Tuesday, May 02, 2006
My Favorite Metadata Example
In my opinion, the best and most intuitive example of metadata is digital music. I recently wrote a song about the unique name of my company, Oberon Associates, Inc. Here is the Dublin Core attributes of the song:
Title: O' Oberon
Creator (author): Michael C. Daconta
Subject or keywords: song,"Oberon Associates, Inc.",company,tribute
Description: A song about the company I work for, Oberon Associates, Inc., and the varying semantics of the word "Oberon". Specifically there are 6 references to the word Oberon and 2 literary references.
Date: 2006-05-03
Type: audio/mpeg
DCMI Type: [None]CollectionDatasetEventImageInteractive ResourcePhysical ObjectServiceSoftwareSoundText
Format: audio/mpeg 2446489 bytes
Identifier: http://www.daconta.us/Media/oberon-song.mp3
Language: en
Coverage: http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Sound
Rights management: (c) 2006 Michael C. Daconta
(Note: if you want the lyrics or chords to the song, you can get see them www.daconta.us).
You could enter these into dcdot to create an RDF version of the metadata. This song has 6 references to the semantics of Oberon and 2 literary references. In later posts, I will explore those semantics by creating richer metadata descriptions. Without the metadata, this song's value is almost counter-productive because people are very sensitive to their music. Music is powerful because it elicits emotion. Try randomly blaring a piece of music to someone you know nothing about and see what kind of reaction you get. Most of the time it will be negative. People strongly rely on music metadata (genre, artist, decade, etc.) to guide them to the right music. Metadata is all about guiding you to the "right" resource.
Title: O' Oberon
Creator (author): Michael C. Daconta
Subject or keywords: song,"Oberon Associates, Inc.",company,tribute
Description: A song about the company I work for, Oberon Associates, Inc., and the varying semantics of the word "Oberon". Specifically there are 6 references to the word Oberon and 2 literary references.
Date: 2006-05-03
Type: audio/mpeg
DCMI Type: [None]CollectionDatasetEventImageInteractive ResourcePhysical ObjectServiceSoftwareSoundText
Format: audio/mpeg 2446489 bytes
Identifier: http://www.daconta.us/Media/oberon-song.mp3
Language: en
Coverage: http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Sound
Rights management: (c) 2006 Michael C. Daconta
(Note: if you want the lyrics or chords to the song, you can get see them www.daconta.us).
You could enter these into dcdot to create an RDF version of the metadata. This song has 6 references to the semantics of Oberon and 2 literary references. In later posts, I will explore those semantics by creating richer metadata descriptions. Without the metadata, this song's value is almost counter-productive because people are very sensitive to their music. Music is powerful because it elicits emotion. Try randomly blaring a piece of music to someone you know nothing about and see what kind of reaction you get. Most of the time it will be negative. People strongly rely on music metadata (genre, artist, decade, etc.) to guide them to the right music. Metadata is all about guiding you to the "right" resource.
