Why Metadata Matters

Date: 24/11/04 Metadata matters to every organisation. Imagine walking down a shopping aisle and all the tin cans had no labels. You wouldnt know if a can contained baked beans, tinned fruit or cat food! Labels are important for identifying the contents of a can of food and for grouping similar cans together for easy search and retrieval. Non-existent or poor labelling can be disastrous when it comes to meal preparation. Labels matter. Descriptive function In a similar way, metadata functions like labels on canned food. It describes the attributes and contents of an original document or work within an organisation. It makes it easy for people to find what theyre looking for. Metadata can be described more fully as "data associated with objects that relieves their potential users of having to have full advance knowledge of their existence and characteristics." In other words, standard bibliographic information, summaries, indexing terms, and abstracts are all surrogates for the original material, hence the term metadata. Metadata describes the original data so people who want to use it can easily find it and determine whether the data will meet their needs without having to absorb the original data themselves. With the growth of the World Wide Web as a place to store data, adequate metadata has grown in importance, as more users are trying to make sense of an ocean of poorly catalogued information. Metadata serves several functions. First, it acts as a surrogate for a larger whole. It must characterize the original work sufficiently for the user to understand its contents, as well as its purpose, source, and perhaps conditions of use. This is vital for large collections of data, such as the NASA EOSDIS data, which are enormous data sets. Standard structure & terminology In addition to its descriptive function, however, a metadata scheme, to be successful, must also establish standard structure and terminology. It benefits no one to have fields labelled "creator," "author," "sculptor," or "composer" if these fields, which all serve the same function, cannot be mapped to the same single concept. Similarly, creating an "author field," but allowing use of "Joe Smith," "Smith, Joseph R.," and "Smith, J.R." as alternative forms of the same name does not serve the purpose of grouping all the works by the same person, regardless of what form of the name is used. One form needs to be established, through either an automatic authority list or a standard controlled vocabulary, and then links need to map alternative forms to the established form.

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Document and record management Metadata plays an important role in document and record management. It is the metadata that enables users of the documents and records to understand the context of the documents creation, to easily discover the intent of the document and find other related information. Without adequate metadata the task of managing documents and records becomes more complicated. Any good electronic document and record management system will encourage the creators of documents and records to register as much useful metadata about the document as possible. Obviously accurate metadata is invaluable in assisting with information retrieval. Information retrieval depends on searchers being able to find the information they are looking for. By ensuring an information management system is using accurate and consistent metadata, an organisation can be confident that users can find relevant information using readily understandable terms. For example, a search on items with the Author: Joe Smith will return all articles authored by Joe Smith, but only if a consistent metadata scheme has been implemented. Indeed it may be necessary to capture additional metadata about each Joe Smith so that they can be distinguished from one another. Normally the person creating or registering the item is the person who knows what metadata needs to be registered for that item; so one way to ensure the correct metadata for an item is recorded is by encouraging the users of the information to register it within the information management system. However, some control needs to be put in place to ensure that all users register the metadata in the same way, as noted above if users can register documents created by Joe Smith in a variety of different ways the task of finding all the documents authored by Joe Smith is made much more complicated. Implementation This creates a new challenge for organisations wishing to implement a document or record management system; that of ensuring that firstly, the important metadata are recorded and secondly, that the metadata are consistent between users and applications. This second challenge can be met by limiting the choice available to users through a controlled vocabulary or choice list. Any information management system should allow organisations to configure the metadata scheme available to users to limit them to a controlled thesaurus or vocabulary. Standards & guidelines Any organisation that implements an information management system should spend some time and effort considering how it will manage its corporate metadata, and how it will implement its corporate metadata scheme. There are a number of different metadata standards and guidelines available to organisations today.

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Dublin Core The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative attempts to address these problems by creating a standard set of elements to record the metadata associated with web resources. In fact, Dublin Core metadata is specifically intended to support resource discovery. The elements represent a broad, interdisciplinary consensus about the core set of elements that are likely to be widely useful to support resource discovery. The 15 elements, without qualifiers that make up simple Dublin Core are; Title, Creator, Subject, Description, Publisher, Contributor, Date, Type, Format, Identifier, Source, Language, Relation, Coverage, Rights These 15 elements may have qualifiers added to them to provide additional information for example a date may be further identified as being a particular kind of date such as date created, date last modified, or date published etc. Qualifiers can allow increased specificity or precision of the metadata, but also introduce complexity that can impair interoperability. Thus designers of metadata systems are advised to be conservative about deploying qualifiers in cases where the interoperability is one of the design objectives. For example, if the plan is to output the data to XML so that it can be used in another application then the users need to be careful to use only metadata terms that will be meaningful to the new application. Dublin Core interoperability qualifiers are those that have been approved in the Dublin Core community and are a formal part of the registry of Dublin Core metadata. Designers should select qualifiers that come from this set to the extent they meet the functional requirements for a given application. It is worthwhile remembering that any resource may have any number (including none) of these 15 metadata elements. The key issue here isnt how many metadata tags a user puts on their document, although obviously the more information that is registered the easier the resource will be to find - what matters is that they use the tags in the same manner as every other user. That is that user 1s definition of Creator is the same as user 2s definition of Creator. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative began in 1995 to develop conventions for resource discovery on the World Wide Web. The focus of discussion was electronic resources. It was clear at the outset, however, that the semantics of resource discovery should be independent of the medium of the resource, and that there are obvious advantages for using the same semantic model across media. Thus, considerable attention has been invested in making the Dublin Core sufficiently flexible to represent resources (and relationships among resources) that are both digital and exist in traditional formats as well. The idea behind Dublin Core, and other standards is that they allow objects to be easily transferred between systems. An object described using one metadata format can be easily imported into another system that understands the format.

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The problem with these standards is that there is no one standard. While the standards have considerable overlap or in some cases, one may be a subset of another, there is no universally agreed metadata standard. Other standards There are other metadata standards an organisation could implement to ensure their corporate metadata is consistent. Other notable standards include Pittsburgh, Public Records Office Victoria (VERS), New South Wales State Records Office, AGLS (Australian Archives). Many of these alternate standards have much in common with Dublin Core. Some are supersets (they have all the core elements plus some options) others leave off some of the "core" elements. They invariably use different terminology to describe the same element. The standards are generally academic in nature. Interestingly the Dublin Core standard is very broad in scope. The "Type" element for example identifies any of the following: Collection Dataset Event Image Interactive resource Model Party Physical object Place Service Software Sound Text Which standard? The decision about what metadata standard to implement is a complicated one, which can only be made by the organisation itself. Only the people using the information management system have the in-depth knowledge of what metadata they need to record. No information management system can specifically support all metadata standards, as this would create a cumbersome database with overlapped functionality. The best any system can do is provide enough fields to accommodate the metadata required and allow the organisation to label the fields accordingly. TOWER Softwares electronic record and document management product TRIM Context has been produced by people who understand the difficulties in implementing a metadata scheme. TRIM Context provides a superset of metadata tags. TRIM Context has no practical limit to the number of user-defined fields available for attaching appropriate metadata to business records. Hence, there is no difficulty in satisfying any metadata standards metadata set.

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TOWER Software keeps abreast of international standards that have an impact on the document management and recordkeeping marketplace. Standards such as: US DoD 5015.2 (Records management standard for US Department of Defense) Public Records Office Electronic Records in Office Systems Project (UK) TRIM Context has been certified against these standards. TRIM Context is a complete, off-the-shelf solution for any organisations information management needs. TRIM Context facilitates: Electronic Document Management Web based Document Management Knowledge Management Records Management Workflow Imaging, and Electronic Recordkeeping

About TOWER Software

TOWER Software delivers Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) Solutions, empowering organizations to take control of their corporate information assets. TOWER Software's award-winning TRIM Context solution is a single, integrated platform that manages business information throughout its complete lifecycle. By relying on its proven domain expertise, strong strategic partnerships, and powerful solutions, TOWER Software enables organizations to maintain accuracy, maximize efficiency, and achieve and maintain standards compliance across industries, resulting in sustained competitive advantage. TOWER Software is a privately held company with operations in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information, visit www.towersoft.com.

TOWER Software - Asia Pacific Head Office - Canberra ACT www.towersoft.com.au TOWER Software North America www.towersoft.com TOWER Software Europe, Middle East & Africa www.towersoft.co.uk
TRIM Context is a registered trademark of TOWER Software. All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 TOWER Software

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