Metadata

Featuring new developments driven by semantic technologies and digital data and information, with an accompanying website and supplementary learning materials, this remains the definitive primer on metadata for students, instructors, faculty, and professionals at all levels of experience.

This benchmark text is back in a new edition thoroughly updated to incorporate developments and changes in metadata and related domains. Zeng and Qin provide a solid grounding in the variety and interrelationships among different metadata types, offering a comprehensive look at the metadata schemas that exist in the world of library and information science and beyond. Readers will gain knowledge and an understanding of key topics such as

• the fundamentals of metadata, including principles of metadata, structures of metadata vocabularies, and metadata descriptions;
• metadata building blocks, from modeling to defining properties, from designing application profiles to implementing value vocabularies, and from specification generating to schema encoding, illustrated with new examples;
• best practices for metadata as linked data, the new functionality brought by implementing the linked data principles, and the importance of knowledge organization systems;
• resource metadata services, quality measurement, and interoperability approaches;
• research data management concepts like the FAIR principles, metadata publishing on the web and the recommendations by the W3C in 2017, related Open Science metadata standards such as Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) version 2, and metadata-enabled reproducibility and replicability of research data;
• standards used in libraries, archives, museums, and other information institutions, plus existing metadata standards' new versions, such as the EAD 3, LIDO 1.1, MODS 3.7, DC Terms 2020 release coordinating its ISO 15396-2:2019, and Schema.org’s update in responding to the pandemic; and
• newer, trending forces that are impacting the metadata domain, including entity management, semantic enrichment for the existing metadata, mashup culture such as enhanced Wikimedia contents, knowledge graphs and related processes, semantic annotations and analysis for unstructured data, and supporting digital humanities (DH) through smart data.

A supplementary website provides additional resources, including examples, exercises, main takeaways, and editable files for educators and trainers.

Marcia Lei Zeng is Professor of Information Science at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, where she teaches knowledge organization systems (KOS), metadata, Linked Data, and cultural heritage informatics. Her primary research interests include KOS, Linked Data, metadata, smart data and big data, database quality control, semantic technologies, and digital humanities. Her scholarly publications consist of more than 100 papers and six books, as well as over 200 national and international conference presentations, invited lectures, and keynote speeches. Her research projects have received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), OCLC, Ohio Board of Regents, Fulbright, and other esteemed academic and scientific foundations. Dr. Zeng has chaired or served on numerous committees, working groups, and executive boards for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Special Libraries Association (SLA), Association of Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), the US National Information Standards Organization (NISO), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Dr. Zeng holds a PhD from the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jian Qin is Professor at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. Recipent of the 2020 LITA/OCLC Kilgour Research Award, her research interest areas include metadata, knowledge modeling and organization, ontologies, and scientific communication. Her research was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health/National Center for General Medical Science, Sloan Foundation/Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).She has published widely in scholarly journals and presented her research at national and international conferences, is the co-author of the book Metadata, and co-editor for several special journal issues on knowledge discovery in databases and knowledge representation. She has served on numerous committees in the Association of Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), DCMI, and other professional communities and is a Distinguished Member of ASIS&T. She holds a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from Western University and a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.