Information collection and discovery tasks involve aggregation and manipulation
of information resources. An information resource is a location from which a human
gathers data to contribute to his/her understanding of something significant. Repositories
of information resources include the Google search engine, the ACM Digital Library,
Wikipedia, Flickr, and IMDB. Information discovery tasks involve having new ideas in
contexts of information collecting.
The information one needs to collect is large and diverse and hard to keep track
of. The heterogeneity and scale also make difficult writing software to support
information collection and discovery tasks. Metadata is a structured means for
describing information resources. It forms the basis of digital libraries and search
engines.
As metadata is often called, "data about data," we define meta-metadata as a
formal means for describing metadata as an XML based language. We consider the
lifecycle of metadata in information collection and discovery tasks and develop a metametadata
architecture which deals with the data structures for representation of metadata
inside programs, extraction from information resources, rules for presentation to users, and logic that defines how an application needs to operate on metadata. Semantic
actions for an information resource collection are steps taken to generate representative
objects, including formation of iconographic image and text surrogates, associated with
metadata.
The meta-metadata language serves as a layer of abstraction between information
resources, power users, and application developers. A power user can enhance an
existing collection visualization application by authoring meta-metadata for a new
information resource without modifying the application source code. The architecture
provides a set of interfaces for semantic actions which different information discovery
and visualization applications can implement according to their own custom
requirements. Application developers can modify the implementation of these semantic
actions to change the behavior of their application, regardless of the information
resource.
We have used our architecture in combinFormation, an information discovery
and collection visualization application and validated it through a user study.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-12-7555 |
| Date | 2009 December 1900 |
| Creators | Mathur, Abhinav |
| Contributors | Kerne, Andruid |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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