Unit 5: Information Organization by Database, Metadata

Metadata:

My basic understanding of metadata is that it is “information about information”. But after reading Anne J. Gilliland’s article, it’s clear that there is a whole lot to it than my original thought. It seems that each organization, group, or institution creates their own definition of metadata, or at least the metadata that they are utilizing. We can also create our own metadata by creating tags, which we also read about in “Everything is Miscellaneous” by David Weinberger. User-created metadata allows us to personalize web pages and sites and as Gilliland writes, “the sense of ownership shared among more parties than just those who create information repositories” (p. 5). There are also various categories and characteristics of metadata. Overall I’d say that metadata is much more complex than I had thought.

Databases:

This article was like reading a foreign language! Basically, a database “consists of an organized collection of data for one or more uses, typically in the digital form”. There are a wide range of structures and types of databases, and also methods of organization. Security is also an important component, who can access and who cannot. From this article I’ve learned it takes quite a bit of knowledge to create, manage and run databases. There are many different aspects within databases to ensure that database users have the correct access to the database and to the materials within the database.


Dublin Core Data Model:

Personally, the most important part of this article is that the DCDI has attempted to establish standards that go across the disciplines, but also recognized that each group “may choose richer semantic definitions” than the DCDI. With this, they also tried to create a relation between the Dublin definition and a richer definition.