Building blocks of metadata: What can we learn from Lego™?

The idea that metadata, particularly Dublin Core, could be usable as a Lego™-like construction kit has been a popular suggestion for over a decade. In this paper, we first explore what this metaphor originally meant – why the idea is so appealing, and what design lessons we might take from the idea. We take a look at how close we are today to that ideal, looking at examples of real-world metadata design projects, and suggest that at present the situation is often more analogous to a game of Tetris – that is, the construction kit is sometimes limited, time concerns are often an issue, and there is limited opportunity for creativity. We explore patterns of collaboration in existing projects, such as the Scholarly Works Application Profile development. Finally, we ask how what we know about the process of building a shared understanding and formalisation about a domain can help us come closer to the ideal of Dublin Core as an approachable puzzle-game or construction kit

Understanding user communities from social network data

This paper presents an exploratory study, which uses dynamic social network analysis of posts from the Tumblr blogging site relating to the Tate galleries to observe user community change. The findings of this research were presented at the 1st Int. Workshop on Semantic Change & Evolving Semantics (SuCCESS'16) organised by PERICLES partners to explore emerging research in the areas of semantic change and evolving semantics

UDDI and IESR:A report for the Joint Information Systems Committee-funded IESR project

Belgium Herbarium image of Meise Botanic Garden

Multilayered paper prototyping for user concept modeling:Supporting the development of application profiles

This paper describes an investigation of user-centered design methodologies intended to apply to metadata or information architecture evaluation and deployment. The primary focus of this work is investigation of user conceptual models and comparison with formally architected models. We describe related work, primarily from the domain of information architecture, such as free-listing, contextual enquiry, card-sorting and evaluation, and then describes the design, initial evaluation and practical use of a multi-stage prototyping method designed for elicitation of user knowledge and concepts of a domain, common conceptual models in that domain and the objects, collections and relations between objects considered relevant by users. A simple approach to the analysis of results is described