Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Democratizing Metadata

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Metadata

Abstract

For most of its long and illustrious history, metadata has tended to be the preserve of the professional, the librarian, the archivist or the scholar. This chapter discusses ways in which the creation of metadata has recently moved away from being the domain of experts to something more democratic. Crowdsourcing, the use of the internet for mobilizing large numbers of people to create metadata, has proved enormously successful in fields as diverse as astronomy, climate science and palaeography. Folksonomy, the creation of subject tags by users of such services as Flickr, has shown the potential for generating new ways of organizing knowledge but also presents problems of potentially messy metadata. A means to reconcile expert- and democratically-created metadata, which was suggested in a recent book, appears to offer a way forward.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Aristotle. (1944). Aristotle in 23 volumes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Surowiecki, J. (2005). The wisdom of crowds. New York: Anchor Books.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Internet Movie Database. (2015). IMDb – Movies, TV and Celebrities – IMDb. http://www.imdb.com/. Accessed 11 Dec 2015.

  4. LibraryThing. (2015). LibraryThing | Catalog your books online. https://www.librarything.com/. Accessed 11 Dec 2015.

  5. Zooniverse. (2015). Galaxy Zoo. http://www.galaxyzoo.org/. Accessed 7 Dec 2015.

  6. Hopkin, M. (2007). See new galaxies – Without leaving your chair. Nature. http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070709/full/news070709-7.html. Accessed 7 Dec 2015.

  7. Lintott, C., Schawinski, K., & Bamford, S. (2011). Galaxy Zoo 1: Data release of morphological classifications for nearly 900 000 galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 410, 166–178.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Pinkowski, J. (2010). How to classify a million galaxies in three weeks. Time. http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1975296,00.html. Accessed 26 Feb 2016.

  9. Secorum Palet, L. (2014) Crowdsourcing science goes boom. USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/25/ozy-crowdsourcing-science/13143465/. Accessed 8 Dec 2015.

  10. Zooniverse. (2015). Moon Zoo. http://www.moonzoo.org/. Accessed 8 Dec 2015.

  11. Zooniverse. (2015). The Milky Way Project. http://www.milkywayproject.org/. Accessed 8 Dec 2015.

  12. Zooniverse. (2015). Planet Hunters. http://www.planethunters.org/. Accessed 8 Dec 2015.

  13. Zooniverse. (2015). Old Weather. http://www.oldweather.org/. Accessed 8 Dec 2015.

  14. Zooniverse. (2015). Ancient Lives | Help us to Transcribe Papyri. http://www.ancientlives.org/. Accessed 8 Dec 2015.

  15. Zooniverse. (2015). What’s the score at the Bodleian. http://www.whats-the-score.org/. Accessed 8 Dec 2015.

  16. Vander Wal, T. (2007). Folksonomy :: vanderwal.net. http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html. Accessed 10 Dec 2015.

  17. Flickr. (2015). Flickr, a Yahoo company | Flickr – Photo Sharing! https://www.flickr.com/. Accessed 10 Dec 2015.

  18. Robu, V., Halpin, H., & Shepherd, H. (2009). Emergence of consensus and shared vocabularies in collaborative tagging systems. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), 3, 14.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Wetzker, R., Zimmermann, C., Bauckhage, C., & Albayrak, S. (2010). I tag, you tag: Translating tags for advanced user models. In Proceeding of the third ACM international conference on web search data mining (pp. 71–80). New York: ACM.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Van Damme, C., Hepp, M., & Siorpaes, K. (2007). Folksontology: An integrated approach for turning folksonomies into ontologies. In International workshop Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0 (SemNet 2007) 4th European Semantic Web conference (pp. 57–70), Innsbruck, Austria.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Alemu, G., & Stevens, B. (2015). An emergent theory of digital library metadata: Enrich then filter. Waltham: Chandos Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Warburg Institute, University of London, London, UK

    Richard Gartner

Authors
  1. Richard Gartner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Gartner, R. (2016). Democratizing Metadata. In: Metadata. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40893-4_9

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40893-4_9

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40891-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-40893-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation