Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

A Transformative Concept: From Data Being Passive Objects To Data Being Active Subjects, Hans-Peter Plag, Shelley-Ann Jules-Plag

OES Faculty Publications

The exploitation of potential societal benefits of Earth observations is hampered by users having to engage in often tedious processes to discover data and extract information and knowledge. A concept is introduced for a transition from the current perception of data as passive objects (DPO) to a new perception of data as active subjects (DAS). This transition would greatly increase data usage and exploitation, and support the extraction of knowledge from data products. Enabling the data subjects to actively reach out to potential users would revolutionize data dissemination and sharing and facilitate collaboration in user communities. The three core elements …

Linked Data Demystified: Practical Efforts To Transform Contentdm Metadata For The Linked Data Cloud, Silvia B. Southwick, Cory K. Lampert

Library Faculty Presentations

The library literature and events like the ALA Annual Conference have been inundated with presentations and articles on linked data. At UNLV Libraries, we understand the importance of linked data in helping to better service our users. We have designed and initiated a pilot project to apply linked data concepts to the practical task of transforming a sample set of our CONTENTdm digital collections data into future-oriented linked data. This presentation will outline rationale for beginning work in linked data and detail the phases we will undertake in the proof of concept project. We hope through this research experiment to …

Analysis And Synthesis Of Metadata Goals For Scientific Data, Craig Willis, Jane Greenberg, Hollie C. White

Faculty Scholarship

The proliferation of discipline-specific metadata schemes contributes to artificial barriers that can impede interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The authors considered this problem by examining the domains, objectives, and architectures of nine metadata schemes used to document scientific data in the physical, life, and social sciences. They used a mixed-methods content analysis and Greenberg’s (2005) metadata objectives, principles, domains, and architectural layout (MODAL) framework, and derived 22 metadata-related goals from textual content describing each metadata scheme. Relationships are identified between the domains (e.g., scientific discipline and type of data) and the categories of scheme objectives. For each strong correlation …

Skos And The Semantic Web: Knowledge Organization, Metadata, And Interoperability, Eric A. Robinson

Other Topics

The Simplified Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a Semantic Web framework, based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for thesauri, classification schemes and simple ontologies. It allows for machine-actionable description of the structure of these knowledge organization systems (KOS) and provides an excellent tool for addressing interoperability and vocabulary control problems inherent to the rapidly expanding information environment of the Web. This paper discusses the foundations of the SKOS framework and reviews the literature on a variety of SKOS implementations. The limitations of SKOS that have been revealed through its broad application are addressed with brief attention to the proposed …

Metadata Basics: A Literature Survey And Subject Analysis, Nicole Mitchell

The Southeastern Librarian

Librarians today are wrestling with an everchanging digital environment. In some way oranother, we must all adapt to new technologies, skills, and ways of thinking. What comes to mind when you hear the word “metadata?” Is itintimidating? Do metadatists and catalogers explain the term adequately? While this articleby no means captures all there is about metadata, it is intended to provide librarians with a basic understanding of what is involved in metadatawork.

Ranking Complex Relationships On The Semantic Web, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Christian Halaschek-Wiener, I. Budak Arpinar, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Industry and academia are both focusing their attention on information retrieval over semantic metadata extracted from the Web, and it is increasingly possible to analyze such metadata to discover interesting relationships. However, just as document ranking is a critical component in today's search engines, the ranking of complex relationships would be an important component in tomorrow's semantic Web engines. This article presents a flexible ranking approach to identify interesting and relevant relationships in the semantic Web. The authors demonstrate the scheme's effectiveness through an empirical evaluation over a real-world data set.

Logical Information Modeling Of Web-Accessible Heterogeneous Digital Assets, Kshitij Shah, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper introduces the MREF framework for representing and correlating information at a higher semantic level than is possible with Web-based information systems today. The role that metadata plays in this framework is described, together with a metadata based infrastructure to support our media independent information correlation paradigm. To keep it consistent with evolving standards, broader acceptance and ease of implementation, MREF abstraction is structured on top of RDF and XML. Its central role in the context of the InfoQuilt system, for exploiting heterogeneous digital media using a federated and scalable architecture, is briefly described.

Zebra Image Access System, Srilekha Mudumbai, Kshitij Shah, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnan Parasuraman, Clemens Bertram

Kno.e.sis Publications

The ZEBRA system, which is part of the VisualHarness platform for managing heterogeneous data, supports three types of access to distributed image repositories: keyword based, attribute based, and image content based. A user can assign different weights (relative importance) to each of the three types, and within the last type of access, to each of the image properties. The image based access component (IBAC) supports access based on computable image properties such as those based on spatial domain, frequency domain or statistical and structural analysis. However, it uses a novel black box approach of utilizing a Visual Information Retrieval (VIR) …

Managing Multiple Information Sources Through Ontologies: Relationship Between Vocabulary Heterogeneity And Loss Of Information, Eduardo Mena, Vipul Kashyap, Arantza Illarramendi, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The ability to deal with a huge number of independent and heterogeneous repositories is the most critical problem in Global Information Systems. One approach to enable efficient query processing is by utilizing semantic descriptions (organized as ontologies) of such repositories whenever available.

In this context semantic relationships among ontologies can be used Query Processors. Three kind of relationships are considered: synonyms and hypernyms. Using synonyms the semantic of the query is preserved; however, when synonyms are not available and hypernyms or hyponyms are used there exists some loss of information that must be measured.