[Description] | [Project Details and Contacts] | [Documents]  

Repositories and portals are struggling to provide resource discovery metadata for the rapidly growing number of new digital resources. Without it, resources remain hidden and unused and much of the original investment is wasted. Increasingly, repositories entertain the hope that automated metadata generation will provide a solution. However, there is no single tool or suite of tools to which portal and repository managers can go to meet most of their metadata generation requirements. The available tools generally handle a narrow range of digital formats, generate a restricted element set and, in the case of extraction algorithms, are mostly effective within narrow subject domains or for documents of a predictable layout or genre. There is no registry or trusted body of documentation that rates the quality of metadata generation tools or identifies the most effective tool(s) for any given task. Benchmarks and reliable evaluation studies are conspicuously lacking.

Moreover, the ad hoc nature of interfaces and the wide variations in the format of APIs, when they exist at all, mean that it is not possible to call these tools automatically in a flexible manner, as differently formatted calls need to be explicitly programmed for each interface. A single metadata record will therefore usually require the merging of output from several tools each of which must be invoked separately.

The project aims to:

* Develop a methodology for evaluating metadata generation tools
* Compare the quality of currently available metadata generation tools
* Develop, test and disseminate prototype web services that integrate the best metadata generation tools and functionality.

Our approach will be to transform the best tools into services with well-defined service interfaces, based on XML-based standards such as SOAP and WSDL. We will develop an ontology that allows the metadata generation web services to be given machine-interpretable semantic annotations and descriptions, explicitly representing knowledge about the services in a flexible and extensible way. These annotations will allow the dynamic discovery of appropriate services by software agents, which will be able to invoke these services, combine them into workflows, and monitor the results, with no (or minimal) user interaction. The effectiveness of the prototype metadata generation Web services will be tested on a broad range of digital resources held by AHDS and in co-operation with other repositories and portals.

For further information on the project please contact:

Malcolm Polfreman; Tel: 020 7848 1985 Email: --firstname.lastname@ahds.ac.uk--.

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* Project Proposal PDF document, 163KB

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