Metadata for Semantic and Social Applications

Book excerpt: Metadata is a key aspect of our evolving infrastructure for information management, social computing, and scientific collaboration. DC-2008 will focus on metadata challenges, solutions, and innovation in initiatives and activities underlying semantic and social applications. Metadata is part of the fabric of social computing, which includes the use of wikis, blogs, and tagging for collaboration and participation. Metadata also underlies the development of semantic applications, and the Semantic Web -- the representation and integration of multimedia knowledge structures on the basis of semantic models. These two trends flow together in applications such as Wikipedia, where authors collectively create structured information that can be extracted and used to enhance access to and use of information sources. Recent discussion has focused on how existing bibliographic standards can be expressed as Semantic Web vocabularies to facilitate the ingration of library and cultural heritage data with other types of data. Harnessing the efforts of content providers and end-users to link, tag, edit, and describe their information in interoperable ways (" participatory metadata") is a key step towards providing knowledge environments that are scalable, self-correcting, and evolvable. DC-2008 will explore conceptual and practical issues in the development and deployment of semantic and social applications to meet the needs of specific communities of practice.