metajelo: A Metadata Package for Journals to Support External Linked Objects

We propose a metadata package that is intended to provide academic journals with a lightweight means of registering, at the time of publication, the existence and disposition of supplementary materials. Information about the supplementary materials is, in most cases, critical for the reproducibility and replicability of scholarly results. In many instances, these materials are curated by a third party, which may or may not follow developing standards for the identification and description of those materials. As such, the vocabulary described here complements existing initiatives that specify vocabularies to describe the supplementary materials or the repositories and archives in which they have been deposited. Where possible, it reuses elements of relevant other vocabularies, facilitating coexistence with them. Furthermore, it provides an “at publication” record of reproducibility characteristics of a particular article that has been selected for publication. The proposed metadata package documents the key characteristics that journals care about in the case of supplementary materials that are held by third parties: existence, accessibility, and permanence. It does so in a robust, time-invariant fashion at the time of publication, when the editorial decisions are made. It also allows for better documentation of less accessible (non-public data), by treating it symmetrically from the point of view of the journal, therefore increasing the transparency of what up until now has been very opaque

Accommodating Simplicity and Complexity in Metadata: Lessons from theDublin Core Experience

The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) grew out of a recognized need for improved resource discovery of web resources. Initial work on the DCMES focused on the requirement of simplicity: "ordinary" users should be able to formulate descriptive records based on a relatively simple schema (fifteen free-text elements). Over the years there has been a movement within the Dublin Core community to use the DCMES for more complex and specialized resource description tasks and, correspondingly, develop mechanisms for incorporating such complexity within the basic element set. This work has generally been called qualified Dublin Core. We examine the notion of accommodating complexity in a simple metadata model and argue that the dual requirements are incompatible. We discuss the role of events and processes in more expressive metadata and how simple resource-centric models, such as DCMES, are not equipped to express these semantic

NSDL: OAI and a large-scale digital library

The author presents NSF, program to move science, math, engineering education in the Unites States to digital age, focused effort to develop and model infrastructure for science education on the web. Over 80 independent grants exploring NSDL goals

Semantic Tagging on Historical Maps

Tags assigned by users to shared content can be ambiguous. As a possible solution, we propose semantic tagging as a collaborative process in which a user selects and associates Web resources drawn from a knowledge context. We applied this general technique in the specific context of online historical maps and allowed users to annotate and tag them. To study the effects of semantic tagging on tag production, the types and categories of obtained tags, and user task load, we conducted an in-lab within-subject experiment with 24 participants who annotated and tagged two distinct maps. We found that the semantic tagging implementation does not affect these parameters, while providing tagging relationships to well-defined concept definitions. Compared to label-based tagging, our technique also gathers positive and negative tagging relationships. We believe that our findings carry implications for designers who want to adopt semantic tagging in other contexts and systems on the Web.Comment: 10 page

The ABC ontology and model

This paper describes the latest version of the ABC metadata model. This model has been developed within the Harmony international digital library project to provide a common conceptual model to facilitate interoperability between metadata vocabularies from different domains. This updated ABC model is the result of collaboration with the CIMI consortium whereby earlier versions of the ABC model were applied to metadata descriptions of complex objects provided by CIMI museums and libraries. The result is a metadata model with more logically grounded time and entity semantics. Based on this model we have been able to build a metadata repository of RDF descriptions and a search interface which is capable of more sophisticated queries than less-expressive, object-centric metadata models will allow

The Value of New Scientific Communication Models for Chemistry

This paper is intended as a starting point for discussion on the possible future of scientific communication in chemistry, the value of new models of scientific communication enabled by web based technologies, and the necessary future steps to achieve the benefits of those new models. It is informed by a NSF sponsored workshop that was held on October 23-24, 2008 in Washington D.C. It provides an overview on the chemical communication system in chemistry and describes efforts to enhance scientific communication by introducing new web-based models of scientific communication. It observes that such innovations are still embryonic and have not yet found broad adoption and acceptance by the chemical community. The paper proceeds to analyze the reasons for this by identifying specific characteristics of the chemistry domain that relate to its research practices and socio-economic organization. It hypothesizes how these may influence communication practices, and produce resistance to changes of the current system similar to those that have been successfully deployed in other sciences and which have been proposed by pioneers within chemistry.National Science Foundation, Microsof

metajelo: A metadata package for journals to support external linked objects

We propose a metadata package that is intended to provide academic journals with a lightweight means of registering, at the time of publication, the existence and disposition of supplementary materials. Information about the supplementary materials is, in most cases, critical for the reproducibility and replicability of scholarly results. In many instances, these materials are curated by a third party, which may or may not follow developing standards for the identification and description of those materials. As such, the vocabulary described here complements existing initiatives that specify vocabularies to describe the supplementary materials or the repositories and archives in which they have been deposited. Where possible, it reuses elements of relevant other vocabularies, facilitating coexistence with them. Furthermore, it provides an “at publication” record of reproducibility characteristics of a particular article that has been selected for publication. The proposed metadata package documents the key characteristics that journals care about in the case of supplementary materials that are held by third parties: existence, accessibility, and permanence. It does so in a robust, time-invariant fashion at the time of publication, when the editorial decisions are made. It also allows for better documentation of less accessible (non-public data), by treating it symmetrically from the point of view of the journal, therefore increasing the transparency of what up until now has been very opaque. &nbsp