Comments on: Grand Metadata Tool Ideas

By: Digital Collections Blog » On the Trident Project: Part 1 - Architecture

Digital Collections Blog » On the Trident Project: Part 1 - Architecture — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:56:48 +0000

[...] served as the topic of two posts of mine from late last year, A Metadata Tool that Scales, and Grand Metadata Tool Ideas. Those posts discussed the need, the committee formed to address it, the committee’s [...]

By: Digital Collections Blog » Four-Minute Metadata Tool

Digital Collections Blog » Four-Minute Metadata Tool — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:01:57 +0000

[...] For some blue-sky thinking, see here. [...]

By: Yvonne

Yvonne — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:30:23 +0000

Not sure what you’re going for, but if you aren’t familiar with the GEM project’s RDF-based metadata generation tool, that project might have some models you could use. I used to use their tool to create metadata records for online materials.

http://www.thegateway.org/about/documentation

By: CMarshal

CMarshal — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:02:55 +0000

If you are looking for a non-rdbms platform to work I recommend Brainwave Platform which has a Semantic Database "Poseidon" which is based on RDF model and might help you.

By: Owen Stephens

Owen Stephens — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:52:57 +0000

Some random thoughts:

Are you looking for a tool that helps people create metadata in a consistent way – build schemas etc? Or are you looking for a store in which people can ‘deposit’ their metadata?

These are overlapping ideas, but I think they are distinct – for an important reason. I don’t think you should build anything that *relies* on a central store. I’m not saying you shouldn’t build a store, just don’t assume that all relevant metadata will end up there – it won’t – you won’t be the only community of birdwatchers etc. so you have to embrace the idea that other communities will be building relevant metadata outside your store.

The idea of linking discovery tools intimately to your metadata store worries me – we’ve just realised this is a problem for libraries!

I’m not sure the distinction ‘available on line’ and ‘not available online’ are very meaningful when talking about metadata – if you are only talking about a tool that deals with metadata, and that metadata points to the location (whether online or not), then the function is exactly the same – what differences do you see?

By: David Dorman

David Dorman — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:55:58 +0000

I don’t know how “big” the following idea is, but if you are looking for something that would be very useful, I would like to suggest a portable Ajax-powered MARC and/or XML editor that could be plugged into any web-based development environment.

By: Ed Summers

Ed Summers — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:51:18 +0000

You might want to explore the use of linked-data and in particular RDF for sharing vocabularies for describing things in a grassroots way.

By: Sarah Shreeves

Sarah Shreeves — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:30:07 +0000

wouldn’t something like freebase http://www.freebase.com/ do at least part of this?

By: John King

John King — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:14:19 +0000

We have 5,000 issues of newspapers dating from 1860 – 1923. Because they are poor scans of old microfilm, we get lousy searching results from the built-in search tool in Adobe Acrobat (our images are PDF). There’s way too many images for our staff to tackle – so I’d like to create a database the community at large can use to help index this collection. Example: I was clicking through the collection one day and came upon a great local account of the dedication of Grant’s Tomb. A local reporter went to the event and wrote a fascinating article. If I had the opportunity to index that article on that page of that newspaper – I would have.

I have a Google search tool – but produces poor results. I know I can never index all the great stories in 5,000 papers – but the community at large or interested historical societies could. Maybe one day. I’m very interested in minimum metadata fields that won’t overwhelm the casual, untrained, indexer. Check it out at:
http://www.atlanticlibrary.org/collections/digitized/newspapers/index.asp

By: Jill K

Jill K — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:01:20 +0000

re: Use Case 2 –have you seen Ravelry? It is a well-developed community metadata/social platform where users can enrich images they’ve uploaded to flickr with all sorts of metadata on pattern sources, yarn types, stitches per inch, etc. and connect with each other. It is WILDLY popular and so interesting for info-science types to check out. I’d be happy to show you the site (log-ins required).