©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 1 DCMI 2003 Pre-Conference Workshop: Metadata and Search DC-2003 Seattle, Washington September 28, 2003 Louis Rosenfeld

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 2 I Am… Information architecture (IA) consultant; formerly president Argus Associates Co-author, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (1998, 2002) Co-founder and Director, Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture ( Background in librarianship/information science; Fortune 500 bias

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 3 Metadata: The Post-Cathartic Perspective Meta-data is not just about structured data anymore. -- Robert Seiner Publisher, The Data Administration Newsletter ( 4/03)

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 4 Metadata: The Weary Soldiers Perspective I've decided that good metadata is too expensive for most documents. If you can get an effective title and date on all your important documents, you should declare victory and go out for a beer. --Walter Underwood Principal Architect, Verity Ultraseek (Personal communication, 9/03)

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 5 Metadata: The All-Too-Common Perspective Our information management and access problems will be solved by push search engine personalization CMS implementation metadata. -- Anonymous CIO Megacorp Sometime during the Early Web Age

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 6 Diagnosis: A malady called Silverbulletitis Common affliction among senior managers Evidenced by Single-minded preoccupation with a specific technology or approach Belief that such an approach comprises a solution Constant presence of product literature, pens, mugs, plush toys, and other assorted vendor schwag

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 7 Metadata as Silver Bullet: Think again Inter-cataloger inconsistency (Medline study) Approximately 10% of humanly assigned index terms do not occur in full text; worth the investment to address? Structural interoperability of metadata attributes (DC can help) Semantic merging of metadata values (significant challenge)

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 8 Metadata in Business Setting: Think again Business cultures not used to cooperating Time on task: e.g., six minutes per document X 1M documents = 62.5 FTE for one year Lack of best practices for centralized services (e.g., tagging) Lack of robust tools for metadata management (whither MMS?) Lack of expertise: non-pros doing the work

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 9 Metadata: Part of the Answer Available from:

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 10 So Where and When Should We Apply Metadata? Begs more questions 1.For which content should we develop and apply metadata? 2.How qualified/experienced are those who own content/apply that metadata? 3.Which metadata attributes should we develop? 4.Which metadata vocabularies should be controlled?

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 11 Selecting Content for Metadata: The Value Tier Approach Determine value tiers of content quality that make sense given your users/content/context How to do it? 1.Prioritize and weight quality criteria for different content areas 2.Rate content areas (subjectively and objectively) 3.Cluster into tiers

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 12 The Value Tier Approach: Potential quality criteria Select appropriate criteria for your business context, users, and content Authority Strategic value Currency Freshness Usability Popularity/usage Feasibility Presence of quality existing metadata

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 13 Value Tier Approach: Weighting and scoring

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 14 Value Tier Approach: Prioritization

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 15 Content Workflow: Process and ownership Evaluate content management centralization, owner sophistication Integrate results into content value tiers

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 16 Attribute Selection: Match content, appropriate subset

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 17 Controlled Vocabularies: CV or not CV?

©2003 Louis Rosenfeld LLC. All rights reserved. 18 Contact Information Louis Rosenfeld LLC 902 Miller Avenue Ann Arbor, Michigan USA voice fax