Specialised subject gateways have become an essential tool for locating and accessing digital information resources, with the added value of organisation and previous evaluation catering for the needs of the varying communities using these. Within the framework of a research project on the subject, a software tool has been developed that enables subject gateways to be developed and managed. General guidelines for the work were established which set out the main principles for the technical aspects of the application, on one hand, and on aspects of the treatment and management of information, on the other. All this has been integrated into a prototype model for developing software tools. The needs analysis established the conditions to be fulfilled by the application. A detailed study of the available options for the treatment of information on metadata proved that the best option was to use the Dublin Core, and that the metadata set should be included, in turn, in RDF tags, or in tags based on XML.

This paper begins by discussing the various meanings of metadata both on and off the Web, and the various uses to which metadata has been put. The body of the paper focuses on the Web and the roles that metadata has in that environment. More specifically, the primary concern here is for metadata used in resource discovery, broadly considered. Metadata for resource discovery is on an evolutionary path with bibliographic description as an immediate predecessor. Its chief exemplar is the Dublin Core and its origins, nature and current status will be briefly discussed. From this starting point, the paper then considers the uses of such metadata in the Web context, both currently and those that are planned for. The critical issues that need addressing are its weaknesses for achieving its purposes and alternatives. Finally, the role of libraries in creating systems for resource discovery is considered, from the perspective of the gains made to date with the Dublin Core, the difficulties of merging this effort with traditional bibliographic description (aka MARC and AACRII), and what can be done about the gap between the two. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The South Asia sub-region is now in the forefront of the Open Access movement within developing countries in the world, with India being the most prominent partner in terms of its successful Open Access and Digital Library initiatives. Institutional and policy frameworks in India also facilitate innovative solutions for increasing international visibility and accessibility of scholarly literature and documentary heritage in this country. This publication has its genesis in the recommendations and proceedings of UNESCO-supported international conferences and workshops including the 4th International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL2001, Bangalore); the International Conferences on Digital Libraries (ICDL2004 & ICDL2006, New Delhi); and the International Workshop on Greenstone Digital Library Software (2006, Kozhikode), where many information professionals of this sub-region demonstrated their Digital Library and Open Access initiatives. This book describes successful digital library and open access initiatives in the South Asia sub-region that are available in the forms of open courseware, open access journals, metadata harvesting services, national-level open access repositories and institutional repositories. This book may be considered an authoritative Source-book on Open Access development in this sub-region.

The main problem in the semantic technology today is semantic metadata extraction and description. There is no general method used to extract any type of semantics. The main objective of this research is to analyze existing methods that are used for describing and extracting semantic metadata and to design a metadata extraction system for Lithuanian. The quality analysis of designed system is carried out according to ISO/IEC 9126 standard. The objective of this standard is to provide a framework for the evaluation of software quality. ISO/IEC 9126 does not provide requirements for software, but it defines a quality model, which is applicable to every kind of software.

Model selection is an important part of classification. In this thesis we study the two classification models logistic regression and random forest. They are compared and evaluated based on prediction accuracy and metadata analysis. The models were trained on 25 diverse datasets. We calculated the prediction accuracy of both models using RapidMiner. We also collected metadata for the datasets concerning number of observations, number of predictor variables and number of classes in the response variable.     There is a correlation between performance of logistic regression and random forest with significant correlation of 0.60 and confidence interval [0.29 0.79]. The models appear to perform similarly across the datasets with performance more influenced by choice of dataset rather than model selection.     Random forest with an average prediction accuracy of 81.66% performed better on these datasets than logistic regression with an average prediction accuracy of 73.07%. The difference is however not statistically significant with a p-value of 0.088 for Student's t-test.     Multiple linear regression analysis reveals none of the analysed metadata have a significant linear relationship with logistic regression performance. The regression of logistic regression performance on metadata has a p-value of 0.66. We get similar results with random forest performance. The regression of random forest performance on metadata has a p-value of 0.89. None of the analysed metadata have a significant linear relationship with random forest performance.     We conclude that the prediction accuracies of logistic regression and random forest are correlated. Random forest performed slightly better on the studied datasets but the difference is not statistically significant. The studied metadata does not appear to have a significant effect on prediction accuracy of either model.

This thesis demonstrates the adequacy of an object-oriented approach to the construction of distributed metainformation systems: systems that facilitate information use by maintaining some information about the information. Computer systems are increasingly being used to store information objects and make them accessible via network. This access, however, still relies on an adequate metainformation system: there must be an effective means of specifying relevant information objects. Moreover, distribution requires the metainformation system to cope well with intermittent availability of network resources. Typical metainformation systems developed to date permit information objects to be specified by expressing knowledge about their syntactic properties, such as keywords. Within this approach, however, query results are potentially too large to be transmitted, stored and treated, at reasonable cost and time. Users are therefore finding it difficult to navigate their way through the masses of information available. In contrast, this thesis is based on the principle that a metainformation system IS more effective if it permits information objects to be specified according to their semantic properties, and that this helps managing, filtering and navigating information. Of particular interest is object orientation because it is the stateof- the-art approach to both the representation of information semantics and the Abstract 11 design of reliable systems. The thesis presents the design and implementation of a programming toolkit for the construction of metainformation systems, where information objects can be any entity that contains information, the notion of views permits organising the information space, transactional access is employed to obtain consistency, and replication is employed to obtain high availability and scalability.

Thesis (M.C.S.) - Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 144-147). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: metadata, constraint, data stream, continuous query, optimization. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 275-283).

Thesis (M.S. in Computer Science)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2002. / Thesis advisor(s): Ted G. Lewis, Timothy E. Levin. Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-272). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, May, 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.