Sunday, October 01, 2006

 

Application Metadata and an Ontology


In ferreting the facets of metadata design, I am using "Application Metadata" as a test case. Part of the metadata for an application would be one or more categorization schemes. Here is the start of a categorization scheme for the "purpose" attribute in our application metadata. This simple taxonomy/ontology (created using Protege from Stanford) was developed via a simple categorization exercise on the applications in my start menu on this laptop. The purpose of formalizing this taxonomy was to make it a "formal taxonomy" as expressed in my article on XML.com.
There are some weaknesses in this taxonomy like the "Utilities" class because it is a generic grouping where its subclasses could easily intersect with other classes (which would not work if you wanted each subclass to be disjoint).
This was a useful exercise that did help me as part of my research into metadata design and the facets of a good metadata record. If you have ideas on that let me know or post comments here. Examples of metadata facets are identification, static measurement, dynamic measurement, categorization, etc.
Let's dig in and work out the details of metadata design! More soon...

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