MetaNet - A Metadata Term Thesaurus to Enable

Authors

  • Jane Hunter DSTC Pty Ltd, University of Queensland

Abstract

Metadata interoperability is a fundamental requirement for access to information within networked knowledge organization systems. The Harmony international digital library project [1] has developed a common underlying data model (the ABC model) to enable the scalable mapping of metadata descriptions across domains and media types. The ABC model [2] provides a set of basic building blocks for metadata modeling and recognizes the importance of 'events' to describe unambiguously metadata for objects with a complex history. To test and evaluate the interoperability capabilities of this model, we applied it to some real multimedia examples and analysed the results of mapping from the ABC model to various different metadata domains using XSLT [3]. This work revealed serious limitations in the ability of XSLT to support flexible dynamic semantic mapping. To overcome this, we developed MetaNet [4], a metadata term thesaurus which provides the additional semantic knowledge that is non-existent within declarative XML-encoded metadata descriptions. This paper describes MetaNet, its RDF Schema [5] representation and a hybrid mapping approach which combines the structural and syntactic mapping capabilities of XSLT with the semantic knowledge of MetaNet, to enable flexible and dynamic mapping among metadata standards.

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Published

2006-01-24