Meta-Metadata: An Information Semantic Language and Software Architecture for Collection Visualization Application

Information collection and discovery tasks involve aggregation and manipulation of information resources. An information resource is a location from which a human gathers data to contribute to his/her understanding of something significant. Repositories of information resources include the Google search engine, the ACM Digital Library, Wikipedia, Flickr, and IMDB. Information discovery tasks involve having new ideas in contexts of information collecting. The information one needs to collect is large and diverse and hard to keep track of. The heterogeneity and scale also make difficult writing software to support information collection and discovery tasks. Metadata is a structured means for describing information resources. It forms the basis of digital libraries and search engines. As metadata is often called, "data about data," we define meta-metadata as a formal means for describing metadata as an XML based language. We consider the lifecycle of metadata in information collection and discovery tasks and develop a metametadata architecture which deals with the data structures for representation of metadata inside programs, extraction from information resources, rules for presentation to users, and logic that defines how an application needs to operate on metadata. Semantic actions for an information resource collection are steps taken to generate representative objects, including formation of iconographic image and text surrogates, associated with metadata. The meta-metadata language serves as a layer of abstraction between information resources, power users, and application developers. A power user can enhance an existing collection visualization application by authoring meta-metadata for a new information resource without modifying the application source code. The architecture provides a set of interfaces for semantic actions which different information discovery and visualization applications can implement according to their own custom requirements. Application developers can modify the implementation of these semantic actions to change the behavior of their application, regardless of the information resource. We have used our architecture in combinFormation, an information discovery and collection visualization application and validated it through a user study

Gestión de colecciones digitales con esquemas de catalogación reconfigurables

Agradezco el apoyo recibido durante estos años por parte de todos los miembros de mi grupo de investigación ILSA en la Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. También a los grupos de investigación LEETHI y LOEP pertenecientes también a la Universidad Complutense, y a la Fundación El Caño de Panamá, sin los que no habría podido realizar parte de los experimentos expuestos en los trabajos.A título personal, deseo agradecer a mis directores José Luis Sierra, Ana Fernández-Pampillón, Antonio Sarasa, y compañeros de grupo de investigación Alfredo Fernández Valmayor, Daniel Rodríguez, Bryan Temprado y César Ruiz por darme la oportunidad de desarrollar estos años de investigación con ellos sobre este campo, esfuerzo que concluye en esta tesis, y por todo lo que me han enseñado sobre cómo ser un buen investigador.Dentro de la universidad también deseo dar las gracias a mis compañeros del “Aula16”: Toni, Dan, Iván, Víctor, Jesús, Pablo, Cristina y Marta con los que he compartido muchas comidas, y cafés, a lo largo de estos años divagando sobre informática. También quiero dar las gracias a mis actuales compañeros del “420bip”: Susana, Vicky, Carlos y Noelia, que me han visto dando los últimos remates estos meses a esta tesis y me han ayudado en todo lo que han podido..

Document level interoperability for Collection Creators

Digital library interoperability for both documents and metadata is a critical and complex issue. Although many relevant standards have been developed, and continue to evolve, in practice things are not quite so easy as they seem. We have built a software environment called the Exchange Center that helps digital librarians manage the process of sourcing documents and metadata from various repositories, adding local content where necessary, and exporting the resulting collection into formats that are suitable for digital library repositories. This paper describes the software, which is built on Greenstone but does not require its use as the final digital library server

Document level interoperability for collection creators

Digital library interoperability for both documents and metadata is a critical and complex issue. Although many relevant standards have been developed, and continue to evolve, in practice things are not quite so easy as they seem. We have built a software environment called the Exchange Center that helps digital librarians manage the process of sourcing documents and metadata from various repositories, adding local content where necessary, and exporting the resulting collection into formats that are suitable for digital library repositories. This paper describes the software, which is built on Greenstone but does not require its use as the final digital library server