Semantic Metadata – do you need it, or even want it?
Simply the word metadata can make executives eyes glaze over and IT professionals refresh their coffee, grab a chair, and talk for hours. And appropriately so, to executives it’s not the nuts and bolts, but the business repercussions, ROI, and reduction in organizational risk that is their primary focus. The term metadata was first used in 1968 by Philip Bagley, in his book “Extension of programming language concepts”. Since then, the word has transition from its original meaning, and seems to be continually morphing, into several distinct definitions.
NISO the National Information Standards Organization, distinguishes among three types of metadata: descriptive, structural and administrative. Descriptive metadata are typically used for discovery and identification, as information used to search and locate an object such as title, author, subjects, keywords, publisher. Structural metadata give a description of how the components of an object are organized. An example of structural metadata would be how pages are ordered to form chapters of a book. Finally, administrative metadata give information to help manage the source. They refer to the technical information including file type or when and how the file was created. Two sub-types of administrative metadata are rights management metadata and preservation metadata. Rights management metadata explain intellectual property rights, while preservation metadata contain information that is needed to preserve and save a resource.
Currently, the word semantic is slowly becoming the differentiator in the vocabulary of many vendors, and is becoming a must have in purchasing unstructured content solutions. Semantics is the study of meaning. As it applies to technology and unstructured content, it represents the ability to extract meaning from words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of text that provide the context within content, and is manually applied or automatically generated as semantic metadata to describe the object. This semantic metadata is typically leveraged to improve search, but any application that uses metadata can achieve significant benefits through the generation or application of semantic metadata.
If you were choosing a tagging, auto-classification solution, would semantic metadata generation be important to you?