Rule categories for collection/item metadata relationships

Abstract

Collections of artifacts, images, texts, and other cultural objects are not arbitrary aggregations, but are designed to support specific research and scholarly activities. Collection-level metadata directly supports this objective, providing critical contextual information. However, exploiting this information, especially in a semantic web environment of linked data, requires a precise formalization of the rules that characterize collection/item metadata relationships. Toward this end we are developing a logicbased framework of relationship rule categories for collection/item metadata. This framework will support metadata specification developers, metadata catalogers, and system designers. In earlier work we described three example rule categories for propagation of information from collections to items. Further reflection, and examination of metadata in an RDF testbed, has revealed eighteen categories, which form an interrelated system with three levels of specificity and formal constraints differentiating categories. This paper summarizes the results of a three year effort, part of the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project.

Expressiveness requirements for reasoning about collection/item metadata relationships

“…These conditions can be combined to create eight fully specialized categories for propagation rules (for example, EP-AD-VC is existential propagation with attribute differentiation and value constraint). [6] identifies a system of logical relationships between the rule categories and although this illuminates some features of the rules, it does not reveal much of the logical expressiveness of the rules. The particular logical constructs that appear in the framework are based on translation of initial natural language characterizations of relationships into first order logic.…”

“…Standard techniques were used to transform the rules given in [6] into clausal form, where each rule is expressed as a universally quantified conjunction of disjunctions …”

“…The group has proposed a framework of rule categories that describe and classify relationships between collectionlevel and item-level metadata [6]. However, the work is far from over.…”

The HathiTrust Research Center Workset Ontology: A Descriptive Framework for Non-Consumptive Research Collections

“…The following formal definitions take it for granted that worksets, as a central feature of the HTRC's scholarly workflow, are a kind of research collection. 1 Previous work describing the kinds of relationships that obtain between collections and the things gathered into them relied on the binary predicate isGatheredInto(x,y) as the key property that supplies a collection's identity conditions [14,15]. It is described at length in Wickett et al [16] While there are many relevant themes that interweave throughout the various accounts, two particular themes emerge from among them [3,8,10,11,12].…”

“…We anticipate delving more deeply into the true nature of curated collections in order to arrive at a more precise definition using more expressive, higher orders of logic. By better defining the relationships between sets of curatorial criteria and items possessing some factor that matches one or more of those criteria we hope to extend the ontology in such a way that it will be able to realize the benefits of previous work describing the relationships that obtain between collections and items [14,15].…”