Metadata enrichment for digital heritage: users as co-creators

This paper espouses the concept of metadata enrichment through an expert and user-focused approach to metadata creation and management. To this end, it is argued the Web 2.0 paradigm enables users to be proactive metadata creators. As Shirky (2008, p.47) argues Web 2.0’s social tools enable “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”. Lagoze (2010, p. 37) advises, “the participatory nature of Web 2.0 should not be dismissed as just a popular phenomenon [or fad]”. Carletti (2016) proposes a participatory digital cultural heritage approach where Web 2.0 approaches such as crowdsourcing can be sued to enrich digital cultural objects. It is argued that “heritage crowdsourcing, community-centred projects or other forms of public participation”. On the other hand, the new collaborative approaches of Web 2.0 neither negate nor replace contemporary standards-based metadata approaches. Hence, this paper proposes a mixed metadata approach where user created metadata augments expert-created metadata and vice versa. The metadata creation process no longer remains to be the sole prerogative of the metadata expert. The Web 2.0 collaborative environment would now allow users to participate in both adding and re-using metadata. The case of expert-created (standards-based, top-down) and user-generated metadata (socially-constructed, bottom-up) approach to metadata are complementary rather than mutually-exclusive. The two approaches are often mistakenly considered as dichotomies, albeit incorrectly (Gruber, 2007; Wright, 2007) . This paper espouses the importance of enriching digital information objects with descriptions pertaining the about-ness of information objects. Such richness and diversity of description, it is argued, could chiefly be achieved by involving users in the metadata creation process. This paper presents the importance of the paradigm of metadata enriching and metadata filtering for the cultural heritage domain. Metadata enriching states that a priori metadata that is instantiated and granularly structured by metadata experts is continually enriched through socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, whereby users are pro-actively engaged in co-creating metadata. The principle also states that metadata that is enriched is also contextually and semantically linked and openly accessible. In addition, metadata filtering states that metadata resulting from implementing the principle of enriching should be displayed for users in line with their needs and convenience. In both enriching and filtering, users should be considered as prosumers, resulting in what is called collective metadata intelligence

A-posteriori provenance-enabled linking of publications and datasets via crowdsourcing

This paper aims to share with the digital library community different opportunities to leverage crowdsourcing for a-posteriori capturing of dataset citation graphs. We describe a practical approach, which exploits one possible crowdsourcing technique to collect these graphs from domain experts and proposes their publication as Linked Data using the W3C PROV standard. Based on our findings from a study we ran during the USEWOD 2014 workshop, we propose a semi-automatic approach that generates metadata by leveraging information extraction as an additional step to crowdsourcing, to generate high-quality data citation graphs. Furthermore, we consider the design implications on our crowdsourcing approach when non-expert participants are involved in the process<br/

Harnessing the cognitive surplus of the nation: new opportunities for libraries in a time of change. The 2012 Jean Arnot Memorial Fellowship Essay.

This essay is the winner of the 2012 Jean Arnot Memorial Fellowship. The essay draws on Rose Holley's experience of managing innovative library services that engage crowds such as The Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program and Trove, and her ongoing research into library, archive and museum crowdsourcing projects. This experience and knowledge has been put into the context of Jean Arnot’s values and visions for Australian libraries. Jean Arnot, the distinguished Australian librarian, described her vision for an innovative library service over sixty years ago. Rose suggests how some of her goals are now being achieved through use of the internet and digital technologies, and how we can build on these to ensure that libraries remain valued and relevant by harnessing the cognitive surplus of the nation they serve, and by crowdsourcing

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN