Web Metadata Compared: Institution, Community, Internet

Baden Hughes, Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia. Email: badenh@csse.unimelb.edu.au

Eve Young, Coordinator - Digital Repositories, Information Services, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia. Email: e.young@unimelb.edu.au

Keywords

metadata, web page metadata, quantitative analysis

Abstract

Before the advent of deep content aware search engines, many popular web search engines required metadata of various types as the basis for their indexing operations. As such, in the mid to late 1990's many organizations invested heavily in the creation web metadata particularly in the form of of HTML tag content to attempt to exert maximum leverage over third party information discovery engines. Especially common were "internal" standards for the use of such metadata elements and associated extensions.

In this paper, we systematically evaluate the usage of one application of web metadata, the largely administrative web metadata in The University of Melbourne's web content. We correlate our findings against work by other researchers in the same enterprise, in communities such as the Open Archives Initiative and the Open Language Archives Community, and on the open web. In doing so we discover that there are some generally similarities, but that overall, web metadata publishing varies considerably. We reflect on a number of the challenges this empirical study reveals, particularly in the instititonal context of web content management and resource discovery.