Metadata (eBook)

Shaping Knowledge from Antiquity to the Semantic Web

Richard Gartner (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2016 | 1st ed. 2016
VIII, 114 Seiten
Springer International Publishing (Verlag)
978-3-319-40893-4 (ISBN)

Infos

This book offers a comprehensive guide to the world of metadata, from its origins in the ancient cities of the Middle East, to the Semantic Web of today.

The author takes us on a journey through the centuries-old history of metadata up to the modern world of crowdsourcing and Google, showing how metadata works and what it is made of. The author explores how it has been used ideologically and how it can never be objective. He argues how central it is to human cultures and the way they develop.

Metadata: Shaping Knowledge from Antiquity to the Semantic Web is for all readers with an interest in how we humans organize our knowledge and why this is important. It is suitable for those new to the subject as well as those know its basics. It also makes an excellent introduction for students of information science and librarianship.

 

Richard Gartner is a librarian and academic who has specialised in the field of metadata and digital libraries for over twenty years. He is currently the Digital Librarian at the Warburg Institute in London. Previously, he was for sixteen years the New Media Librarian for the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where he was responsible for the introduction of the Internet into the Library, its first CD-ROM network and its first digital imaging projects. More recently he was a lecturer at King's College London where he taught and researched metadata and digital curation.

Throughout his career, his research has concentrated on metadata, a subject in which he has published widely.  He is on the editorial board for METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard), a widely-used metadata standard in digital libraries.  He has also maintained a long-term interest in international librarianship, which has taken him in the past to China, Bangladesh, India, Taiwan, Uzbekistan and Armenia amongst other countries.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements 6
Contents 8
Chapter 1: What Metadata Is and Why It Matters 10
A Human Construct 13
Three Types of Metadata 15
Why Metadata Is Needed 17
From Information to Knowledge to Wisdom 18
From Knowledge to Culture: The Role of Curation 21
References 22
Chapter 2: Clay, Goats and Trees: Metadata Before the Byte 23
Ancient Metadata 23
The Arrival of Printing 26
The Nineteenth Century: Information Industrialized 28
The Twentieth Century 31
References 32
Chapter 3: Metadata Becomes Digital 34
Enter MARC 35
Enter the Internet 39
A MARC Standard for the Internet: Dublin Core 40
Metadata Behind the Scenes 42
Old Divisions Cut Deep 43
Standards Everywhere 44
References 45
Chapter 4: Metadata as Ideology 47
Mapping the Universe: Cartographic Ideology 48
Describing the World: Terminology as Ideology 51
Classification: Hierarchy and Ideology 52
The Ideology of ‘Objective’ Metadata 57
References 58
Chapter 5: The Ontology of Metadata 59
Semantics 59
Syntax 62
Content Rules 66
Controlled Vocabularies 67
References 69
Chapter 6: The Taxonomic Urge 70
Taxonomy as Metadata: The World in Hierarchies 71
Thesauri: Introducing Flexibility into Hierarchies 74
A Flowering of Taxonomies 77
References 79
Chapter 7: From Hierarchies to Networks 81
Flattening the Hierarchies: Facetted Classification 81
Ontologies: Metadata as a Network 85
References 90
Chapter 8: Breaking the Silos 91
From Documents to ‘Things’ 92
The Metadata Bypass: Content-Based Retrieval 97
References 100
Chapter 9: Democratizing Metadata 101
Social Cataloguing 102
Citizen Science from Galaxies to Ships’ Logs 103
Folksonomy: Democratic Classification 105
Enrich Then Filter: Making Sense of the Metadata Morass 108
References 109
Chapter 10: Knowledge and Uncertainty 111
References 114
Index 115

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.8.2016
• Zusatzinfo: VIII, 114 p. 33 illus., 28 illus. in color.
• Verlagsort: Cham
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik
• Schlagworte: Information science • Knowledge Representation • Metadata • semantic web • Technical Communication
• ISBN-10: 3-319-40893-3 / 3319408933
• ISBN-13: 978-3-319-40893-4 / 9783319408934