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Collection/Item Metadata Relationships. Karen M. Wickett Richard J. Urban, Larry Jackson, Allen H. Renear Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Collection/Item Metadata Relationships Karen M. Wickett Richard J. Urban, Larry Jackson, Allen H. RenearCenter for Informatics Research in Science and ScholarshipGraduate School of Library and Information ScienceUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign GSLIS Research ShowcaseApril 9, 2010 Digital Collections and Content PIs Tim Cole (2003-2007), Carole Palmer (2007-2010)
The Problem for Collection Description • Collections are built and described to support research and scholarship. Collection descriptions are carefully designed to allow collections to function as more than just aggregates of items. • Contemporary retrieval systems emphasize items, inhibiting the integration of information across collection and item descriptions. • Searchers are then unaware of the important contextual information that arises from collection membership. • To build tools to address this problem, we need a systematic understanding of the logical relationships between collection-level and item-level metadata.
Attribute/Value Propagation: marcrel:OWN Consider the metadata element marcrel:OWN… Plausibly: whoever owns a collection owns each of its items. We say that metadata attributes with this behavior a/v-propagate. Informal definition an attribute a/v-propagates =df if a collection has some value for the attribute then each item in the collection has the same value for that attribute. In first order logic: An attribute Aa/v-propagates =dfxyz [(IsGatheredInto(x,y) & A(y,z)) A(x,z) ] This kind of propagation can be used to retain valuable collection context, especially in a distributed search environment.
Value Propagation: cld:itemType/dc:type • Consider the Dublin Core element type and the DC Collections Application Profile element itemType. • One might conjecture that • if a collection has a value for cld:itemType, • then each of its items has the same value for dc:type. • This is a case of value propagation: Informal definition an attribute v-propagates =df if a collection has some value for the attribute then each item in the collection has that value for some other attribute. In first order logic: An attribute Av-propagates to an attribute B =dfxyz [(IsGatheredInto(x,y) & A(y,z)) B(x,z) ]
Testing the Framework • The original framework was based on an analysis of metadata vocabularies. To examine patterns in real metadata, we built a Semantic Web testbed by deriving RDF from IMLS DCC metadata. • RDF is a logic-based knowledge representation language that allows direct translation from our framework of rules into SPARQL queries. • We can determine how well our value propagation rule reflects the metadata describing itemType and type for a collection by: • Retrieving the itemType values for the collection. • Retrieving the type values for each member of the collection. • The testbed contains a complete “collection graph” with item description, collection description, and collection membership.
Some Results • The relationship patterns do exist in the metadata. • Value propagation is sometimes existential, not universal: • for each collection-level value there will be some items in a collection with values that match, but • some items will have distinct values, not reflected at the collection level. • Values may be related by: • equality, broader than, or narrower than. • These are revealing facts about the semantics of collection description, that can guide the development of sophisicated, context aware search systems.
