Research Projects
Definition and Use of Metadata in Multimedia Archives
Project director: Günther Kolar (on sabbatical since 10/2008, continuation of the project)
Project Period: 10/2006 – 12/2009
Project Objective: Publication (dissertation)
Project Description
Online databases, in other words, information resources that are consistent in amounts of content or stored formats, are a substantial part of the World Wide Web. Organizing these often very large amounts of information into a usable format is an important precondition for an efficient handling of information. Assigning metadata is absolutely necessary for all the functions and applications for searching information that are available to the user.
The goal of this work is the creation of a model for the planning and conception of functions for supporting the search, navigation, selection and assessment of contents from online databases.
In order to be able to exactly assess the possibilities of the metadata that have been added to the information resources, the characteristics, standards, formats and representations of metadata are first considered analytically.
An important factor is the syntactic and semantic interoperability, which enables the metadata to be both machine-readable and machine-interpretable. This improves the preconditions for automated processing. Other exigencies arise from the formal basic conditions for the creation of digital long-term archives, as well as from the demands regarding reliability of digital archives. The meta information can be added in a structured way through taxonomies and other keyword systems (cf. Project II 2: “Taxonomies for Media Art”).
The selected standards and representations of the meta information can flow into improving/refining navigation, labeling, filtering or search, for example.
The relevant metadata are also indispensable for the long-term archiving of digital data: these are mainly intended to describe the formats used and the original system environment. This information should make it possible to read and interpret the data in the future as well.