1 The ABC Metadata Ontology and Model Carl Lagoze, Cornell University Jane Hunter, DSTC

2 Some URLs This talk Latest paper version (JODI submission) Harmony project

3 Harmony Project DSTC/JISC/NSF funding Assumption There is no lingua franca for metadata (Warwick Framework to RDF and XML namespaces)  Although things like DC may provide basis for pidgin exchange Goal Investigate common principles and concepts underlying multiple descriptive models

4 ABC Goals Conceptual basis for understanding and analyzing existing metadata vocabularies and models Provide conceptual guidance to communities developing metadata models Provide a basis for mapping among vocabularies and models

5 Roots and Collaborations DCMI MPEG-7 CIDOC/CRM INDECS CIMI RDF DAML Conceptual Graphs IFLA FRBR

6 ABC Model Overview (Digital) objects have inherent lifecycle characteristics Model creation, evolution, and transformation of objects over time. Notions of temporality are given first-class status Measuring utility of metadata through query- ability Ability to answer who, what, when, where comments that are difficult in simpler models

7 TitleAnna Karenina AuthorLeo Tolstoy IllustratorOrest Vereisky TranslatorMargaret Wettlin Date Created1877 Date Translated1978 Description Adultery & Depression BirthplaceMoscow Birthdate1828 ?

“translator” “Margaret Wettlin” “Orest Vereisky” “illustrator” “Anna Karenina” “Tragic adultery and the search for meaningful love” “English” “author” “creation” “1877” “1978” “translation” “Russian” “Leo Tolstoy” "Moscow" “1828”

9 Entities and their Properties Entities are anchor points for set of properties Entities "change" by modification of property sets Model does not distinguish between "change of nature" and "change of description" Dual facets of Entities Universal – object and its property set that is "global" to the description Existential – object instances and their property sets that are periodic ("stateful")

10 Situations Establish a time period granularity determined by the longevity of entity state within situation Situations and actualities Situations provide context for associating entities in their existential facet. Entities can exist out of situation to express their universal properties

11 Events Transition marker point between situations Always have a time property Levels of increasing knowledge Something happened at a time (that caused change in situation) Type thing happened at some time Anchor point for multiple actions (verbs) within a happening.

12 Events, Actions, Agents Events provide a context for associating actions ("verbs"), 1-n Actions provide a context for participation of agents, 1-n Participation type can be specialized for domain

13 Causality – verbs & predicates Association of actions to Actualities in preceding situation is weak Increasing knowledge of association (esp. important in rights management) involves hasTool hasPatient

14 Intellectual Property Notion of "ability to copy" is the determining factor Promote abstraction to work and actuality to manifestation and item

15 Querying instances of the model Goal: ability to ask questions like “show me all the translations of War and Peace between 1980 and 1990” Squish query language – SQL like RDQL – plug in of query mechanism to RDF API DSTC XML query interface

16 Future Work ABC API built on top of Jena top.html Workflow modeling – tracking provenance “Story telling” description user interface

17 Asking the big questions How much metadata is needed? What is the use of metadata (search engine architecture & query issues)? What are the tradeoffs between human effort and automatic generation (economic issues)? What are proper models for the proper contexts?