Lifecycle Metadata for Digital Objects September 11, 2006 It’s markup all the way down

Some infrastructure details Class meetings: SZB 546, Wed. 1-4 URL of syllabus: 006/fall/INF389K/index.html (presently under construction) Office: SZB 566 Office hours: Tuesday, 9-11 or by appointment TA: Dana Lamparello

What is metadata? Data about data (Information about information?) Kind: what is this thing? Function Management Where How long Access

Metadata and information Shannon and Weaver: what is information? Source Encoder Message Channel Decoder Receiver Saussure: the arbitrariness of the sign Separating signs by gaps Modulating sound or signal Using white space Bracketing objects

Metadata orders Still under construction! Informal series to cover the field of digital metadata Object as representation (1, 2) Meaning/content of object (3, 4) Management of object (5)

First-order metadata (base conventions) Written and spoken language: intrinsic metadata that makes it possible Layout/expressive conventions Separation of words Arrangement of groups of words Punctuation, capitalization, emphasis, etc. Note that this is usually considered to belong to an external standard, and nobody worries about it!

Second-order metadata (rendering) Encoding (ASCII, proprietary formatting schemes) Compression schemes Encryption or other intentional distortion schemes Note that when these are referred to as external standards, and especially when the result is not human-readable, everyone worries about it.

Third-order metadata (meaning) “Connections to the world” Meaning Semantics: what does it mean? Pragmatics: in what context? Classification and facets

Fourth-order metadata (beyond individual objects) Groups of digital object types: “aggregate metadata” Archival series Project files “Complex documents” Books seen as chapters and sections

Fifth-order metadata (instrumentality) Functions What is the digital object’s purpose? What can you do with the digital object? What should you do with/for the digital object? Explicit digital object types “Object types” are clusters of functions Explicit treatment regimes

Why markup? Natural language processing, the dream: self- describing text objects The reality: you can’t do NLP without a lexicon (including semantics) and a grammar Markup allows lexicon and grammar to be contained in the text Markup thus allows all or parts of metadata to be contained in the object

How else to include metadata? File header Additional file with linkage Database segment of DAM/repository system External annotation databases

Markup standards? SGML Proliferation of proprietary markup Now comes the preservation problem: return to standard SGML HTML XML

Metadata standards? Zillions! Dublin Core, VRA Core, etc. MARC->MODS RKMS ODRL, InDECS Etc., etc.