Thinking About/Through Metadata

1. Thinking About/Through Metadata Initial Questions/Issues -How do we describe entities? -How do we describe relationships? -Who creates records? -What are the standards for library cataloging records?

2. Library Standards: AACR/MARC

3. Library Standards: Dublin Core

4. Library Standards: TEI Header

5. object-based ontology “deep-level” description Authorship as the only person-document relationship - “Bibliography is, or should be, a carrier system for ideas and information analogous to a well-articulated railroad system for the transportation of physical commodities.” -- Jesse Shera, Libraries and the Organization of Knowledge (1965) Difficulty in Adopting Standards for RoSE

6. WorldCat Identities

7. WorldCat Identities

8. WorldCat Identities

9. WorldCat Identities

10. -Situated-ness of entities -Meaning never isolated from context -metadata as narrative-forming, not just metrics -Knowledge as already distributed RoSE: Thinking “outside of the repository”

11. The internet does not automatically turn every user into an active producer, and every worker into a creative subject. The process whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the category of free labor signals the unfolding of a different (rather than completely new) logic of value, whose operations need careful analysis --Tiziana Terranova, (2000). “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 18.2 Value and Labor of Metadata Work

12. Metadata E.F. Codd – A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks, 1970 “Future users of large data banks must be protected from having to know how data is organized in the machine.” Astounding duality:1) Yes, the user doesn’t want to know how the database works.2) If they don’t know, how can we keep it organized or expand it?- Now an implicit, industry assumption. Relational schema is fixed by the database programmer.

13. Metadata - Origins

14. Metadata - RoSE

15. Name Birth Date Location fixed fields Person relationship doc-to-doc fixed objects,flexible relations person-to-document Person Document RoSE still implements a relational database, so Person & Document are fixed, but makes extensiveuse of join-tables, so relationships are flexible.

16. Metadata – RoSE Types • Classical problem: “I can’t add this kind of relation” - Technical challenge to databases - Completely eliminated in RoSE • New problem: “What should our relations be?” - Not a database problem (technical), this is a language problem

17. Metadata – Fill-in-the-blanks John Mary Person Person RDF defines a similar subject-verb-object structure, so this aspect of Rose is relevant to the issue of controlled vocabulary in Web 2.0

18. Metadata – Fill-in-the-blanks John Mary All the verb phrases which connect two people. Person Person

19. Metadata – Fill-in-the-blanks John Mary All the verb phrases which connect two people. Person Person Relation Types: loveshatesis father offriendly withadmirescriticizes

20. Metadata - Summary - Researchers, unlike public users, do not want to beprotected from how the database is organized.- Metadata is a two-part problem: - the database problem of fixed fields is partially resolved - the language problem is just beginning- RoSE allows a community to flexibly explore ontological questions around People and Documents.