A talk at the Wellcome Institute's Digitisation Doctor event for organisations in the digitisation process. What is metadata? why do you need it? what does it look like? How do you create it? Putting it on the web Full talk notes are at http://www.cookinrelaxin.com/2013/06/a-short-introduction-to-metadata.html

1. A short
introduction
to metadata
Tristan Ferne
BBC R&D
@tristanf
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd
Research & Development

2. Summary
What metadata is
What it is for
What it looks like
How to create it
Putting it on the web
Research & Development

3. What is
metadata?
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4. Information about something, usually
structured
In this case, information about the thing
you’re digitising
For humans or computers
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5. A book
Title
Author
Date of publication
ISBN identifier
Dewey Decimal Number (on a library)
Research & Development

6. And more...
Edition
Publisher
Publisher’s description
Reviews
Cover picture
Price
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7. What is
metadata
for?
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8. To find things
To identify things
To list things
To link things to other things
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9. What does
metadata
look like?
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11. Unique ID
Creator
Date
Location
Views
Title and
description
Tags
Camera info
Licensing

14. Unique ID
The brand title
Series and
episode
Duration When and where
What it’s
about
Who made
it and who
was in it

16. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicecupoftea/5364762501/

17. Standards are good
Someone’s already defined it
Software probably supports it
It’s interoperable
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18. Dublin Core
Title Format
Creator Identifier
Subject Source
Description Language
Publisher Relation
Contributor Coverage
Date Rights
Type
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19. Where is the metadata?
In the digital file
In a database, linked to the digital file
And online?
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20. How to
create
metadata
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21. Three ways
Experts, archivists, librarians, you!
Volunteers
Computers
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22. Crowdsourcing
Asking volunteers to help solve problems
Online tools
Designed to encourage contributions
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25. Computers
Images to text (OCR)
Keyword and topic extraction from text
Machine translation
Speech-to-text from audio
Speaker identification and diarisation
Harder
Face detection in images or video
Object and scene recognition
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26. Putting it on
the web
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27. the web
=
the internet + links + documents/data
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28. Topics Events
Music Programmes
News Gardening
Archive Food
Michael Smethurst
© BBC MMVIII

29. Linked data
Machine-readable
Unique identifiers
Unambiguous
Defined vocabularies
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32. http://worldservice.prototyping.bbc.co.uk

33. Links mentioned
http://www.flickr.com
http://www.bbc.co.uk
http://dublincore.org/
http://www.galaxyzoo.org/
http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk/
http://worldservice.prototyping.bbc.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd
Research & Development

34. Thanks
tristan.ferne@bbc.co.uk
@tristanf
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd
Research & Development