1. Q: Is it possible
to automate
METADATA
CREATION?
Thursday, March 8, 2012
2. Or, alternatively:
Will I be replaced by a computer?
-or-
Should I have gone to school
for computer science?
Thursday, March 8, 2012
3. How does it work?
There are 2 ways of automatically
creating metadata:
1) Text mining/clustering “Extraction”
2) Machine learning techniques
“Har vesting”
Thursday, March 8, 2012
4. Extraction vs.
Har vesting
Metadata extraction involves the mining of
resource content (text-mining) and employs
sophisticated automatic indexing techniques to
produce structured (“labelled”) metadata for object
representation.
Metadata har vesting relies on machine
capabilities to collect tagged metadata previously
created by humans, machine processing, or both.
Library of Congress, AMeGA Project Report
Thursday, March 8, 2012
5. What kind of metadata can be
automatically created?
Best: Technical or Structural
(format, date, page #s)*
OK: Descriptive (title, abstract)*
Not-so-good: Semantic (keywords, subject
matter)
*Not so effective for when documents have special
layouts or structures.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
6. Why bother?
Lessens time and effort required (Burk et al.,
2007).
“The enormous volume of online and digital
resources makes semi-automatic metadata
generation a critical need” (Park, & Lu, 2009).
Alleviate the problems associated with
“metadata bottleneck”.
Better to start with something rather than
nothing.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
7. Tim Berners-Lee
Inventor of the World Wide Web
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8. “It’s really important to have a lot of data.”
“We haven’t got data on the Web as data.”
“Data can... help us understand the world.”
Tim Berners-Lee. (2009, February). “Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web.”
TED Talk. <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html>
Thursday, March 8, 2012
9. A more efficient way to
present data
An example of the
automatic creation of
data to be reused.
Dates are extracted
by Google and
rearranged into a
timeline.
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10. A: Kind of/
it depends...
Thursday, March 8, 2012
11. Conclusions
No artificial intelligence yet!
Automated metadata creation can be used, but
only with human inter vention.
Some metadata types are easier to automate.
Automation of metadata creation is not widely
used in libraries yet.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
