FA10Q2

Fall 2010 Question 2
Historically, information and subject specialists have taken on the task of creating intellectually generated metadata to describe information resources and enhance information access. More recently, it has been suggested that social tagging would better serve those functions. Discuss this issue. In your discussion, define the terms metadata, intellectually generated metadata, and social tagging. Discuss the differences between the process of generating metadata by information and subject specialists and by social taggers, including strengths and weaknesses for each approach to description.

Response:

metadata: well, the data about the electronic data. Metadata is the information about the document, image, file, video, audio... Dublin Core suggests a minimal amount of 15 elements as a simple schema: Title, Creator, Subject, Description, Publisher, Contributor, Date, Type, Format, Identifier, Source, Language, Relation, Coverage, and Rights. There are DC qualifiers that can be used to be more specific. Metadata encoding is a standard used to mark up data so that it can be understood by both humans or machines. 3 Types of metadata (I will look it up - chapter 5 - Taylor): intellectually generated metadata: used for standarization and interoperability (crosswalking); each field is authoritatively described (Creator: Last, First MI) Strengths: standardized Weaknesses: can be vague and not accessible because of description (woman sitting, woman lounging, woman reclining, female sitting, female lounging...) focus is on technical aspects/display/how to use Includes hardware and software Version control digitization information creation data authentication and security associated search protocols Intellectually generated orgainzation of data: authority control on names, relationships among items intellectual acess to data related to the content of the document, describes a resource for purposes such as discovery and identification (title, abstract, author, and keywords)
 * Administrative
 * Structural
 * Descriptive

social tagging: terms created by users to describe document, image, file, video, audio... Web 2.0 applications allow collaborative tagging. Weakness: no standardization (Creator: First MI Last; Last, FirstIn MI; First Last; Initials only...) / Unstructured Tags directly reflect that of its users not that of the content creator

I will get back to this (DD) - I added some info from Mehra's 520 (F2007) slides (AK)