Three times a week I receive ACM TechNews from ACM: Association for Computing Machinery. This is a publically accessible newsletter that “is intended as an objective news digest for busy IT Professionals.” ACM TechNews has abstracts and links to various technology-related online articles. Though most of the highlighted articles are aimed at computing professionals, particularly software developers, there are occasional pearls for the systems or technical services librarian.

For example, the March 7, 2005 issue of ACM TechNews, has a link to Web Metadata Standards: Observations and Prescriptions.

In the peer-reviewed Metadata Standards article, the researchers give a short overview of current metadata standards, breaking them into either product or process methods. They explain product metadata, “Initiatives in this category standardize descriptions of physical products, data, information resources, and documents. Dublin Core is an early Web metadata initiative”, and “process metadata describes the interaction behavior, as well as how applications execute it, where it’s located, the nature of its security provisions, how to send it data, and so on.”

They follow this with seven issues and prescriptions based on lessons learned from various disciplines, including information science. The lesson learned from software resuse and library science, “include the importance of access points and the question of how best to provide them, the need for practical search and navigation tools, and the drawbacks of offering multiple indexes.” Three prescriptions from this section:

Prescription #3: Experience with library searches indicates that we might have to provide meta-metadata to make searching metadata elements easier for users.

Prescription #4: Although recommended, cataloging methods such as classification schemes and thesauri don’t guarantee metadata success. To help ensure that success, we must educate users and develop practical tools to support their search and navigation through classification and thesaurus hierarchies.

Prescription #5: Standards should introduce additional indexes only if they offer users marginal search benefits.

Issue seven discusses ontologies. In the library world, we have what they call a convention ontology: “Any standardized taxonomy can help interoperability. For example, an industry group might propose a standard object taxonomy so that different authors use the same terminology. We call this a “convention ontology” because its effectiveness depends only on conventional acceptance.” They prescribe limiting the ontology “to a single narrow domain” and using inheritance inferences cautiously.

Citation:
David Bodoff, Patrick C.K. Hung, and Mordechai Ben-Menachem, “Web Metadata Standards: Observations and Prescriptions,” IEEE Software, vol. 22, no. 1, 2005, pp. 78-85.