Metadata. What is it? Why is it important? Marcia L. Zeng Kent State University. Dealing with Metadata: Content, Distribution, and Availability

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1 Dealing with Metadata: Content, Distribution, and Availability Metadata What is it? Why is it important? Marcia L. Zeng Kent State University CSE 2015 Annual Meeting - Council of Science Editors, Philadelphia, PA 1 Two basic questions we ask when seeking information: What is this thing? How does this thing relate to other things? Efforts to answer these questions: Use structured, encoded data to describe characteristics of information bearing entities (things) to aid in the identification, discovery, assessment, and management of the described entities. Screenshot from: 2 PROPERTIES Structural VALUES Specific Image: FDA/Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition.

2 Metadata are structured, encoded data that describe characteristics of information bearing entities to aid in the identification, discovery, assessment, and management of the described entities For different types of data, there will be different data [structured] about them. Metadata describes other data. metadata can be either singular or plural. 4 information-bearing entities Information-bearing entities come in a wide variety of types. Different information-bearing entities require different structured data to describe them in order to be identified, discovered, obtained, and used. The structured, encoded data describing the characteristics of these information-bearing entities are called metadata. 5 Think: What information is in a personal record? information-bearing entities 6

3 Think: How do we know what a map is about? information-bearing entities 7 Think: What is this photo about? When was it taken? Where can I see an original? information-bearing entities 8 This: What will be 'special' when an object is described? "Lunar Olivine Basalt from Apollo 15 in National Museum of Natural History" by Wknight94 information-bearing entities 9

4 What about Data Sets? information-bearing entities Note: metadata need to have standards for: Structure, Value, Coding rule, Exchange format PROPERTIES Structural VALUES Specific Image: FDA/Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition.

5 Metadata about datasets At the front-end 14 At the backend 15

6 Metadata captured from Twitter Tweet collected for Amtrak Philadelphia miles Limit 200 tweet Content of the tweets Metadata about the tweets Tool used: Google Fusion Tables ables/ What are they talking about? -- the topics of these Tweets Tool used: Open Calais.

7 4. Types of Metadata --. Anne J. Gilliland: Setting the Stage, Table 2. In Baca, M. ed. Introduction to Metadata: Pathways to Digital Information. V.3 19 Adobe Bridge Technica l Descriptive Administrative 20 Descriptive Descriptive Technical + Provenance & Meta-metadata 21

8 22 In addition to: Viewed Downloaded Discussed Reviewed Recommended Cited 23 Wikipedia's infobox: DBpedia (Wikipedia's database): Source: 24

9 Graphing the History of Philosophy Using Dbpedia Data Simon Raper, Google's Knowledge Graph Freebase's metadata Now 26 Nature Video. (2014, July 31). Charting culture. The researchers mapped the cultural history of Europe and North America across 3,000 years. The data for the study was drawn from: Freebase (now Wikidata) the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon/ Artists of the World, and Union List of Artist Names (ULAN ) Schich, M. et al A Network Framework of Cultural History.

10 So, why metadata? Information bearing entities come in a wide variety of types. The structured, encoded data describing the characteristics of these information bearing entities are called metadata. A key strategy for sustainable, effective access to information is to have good quality and linkable metadata ready in order to support the needs for management, retrieval, browsing, discovery, use, and re use of resources on any device. Make data based decisions with analytics and visualizations empowered by your metadata and semantic enrichment investment M. Hlava Each of us is both a metadata contributor and a metadata user. We need to better use available metadata creatively and responsively. THANK YOU! Marcia L. Zeng mzeng@kent.edu 28