The session will include presentations and discussion of the issues in using metadata to describe information in digital libraries. One example, will be the role of metadata within the Alexandria Digital Library project at UC Santa Barbara.
If sense is to be made of the flood of information that will be available through digital libraries, it must be described effectively, so that it can be found, its value assessed, and its acquisition handled efficiently. Metadata is the term most often used to refer to the description of information objects to support these three functions of digital libraries. Digital library technology is capable of both supporting major augmentations to traditional metadata activities and providing a basis for catalog interoperability.
Important issues relate to the choice of languages for representing concepts and conceptual structures. Metadata for spatially-referenced information, for example, may follow a "bottom-up" approach that is an extension of traditional library practices or a "top-down" approaches involving more general knowledge representation languages.
Background materials for this session are at: http://www.dlib.org/metadata.html.
REB-A 1/23/96