Leuven, 07.02.2008
Combining User Generated Content
and Traditional Metadata
Martin Memmel
German Research Center for AI
Kaiserslautern, Germany
www.dfki.de/~memmel

From scarcity to abundance –
a short time travel

Information was scarce and in the hand of few
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skriptorium

Gutenberg: Invention of movable type printing (1439)
http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/11300/11358/gutenberg_11358.htm

Biblioteca Angelica, Roma
http://curiousexpeditions.org/2007/09/a_librophiliacs_love_letter_1.html

Plan for the National Library (1785)
Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799)

Welcome to the digital age!

Online Education Database
http://oedb.org/library/features/236-open-courseware-collections

The Long Tail [Anderson 2004]
\"We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday
than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.\"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

http://www.markluthringer.com/RidgemontTypologies/cellphones.html

http://www.google.com

We need information about
the available resources!

Web2.0 &
User Generated Content

http://flickr.com/photos/stabilo-boss

Spell with flickr: http://metaatem.net/words/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_generated_content

http://elearningnuts.de

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pavel1998/407853059/

http://youtube.com/watch?v=36bXgqmQ6rE

http://del.icio.us/search/?fr=del_icio_us&p=learntec&type=all

http://www.facebook.com

http://www.redesignme.org/

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/knowhow/

We are experiencing a
paradigm shift!

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html

From Traditional Media to Social Media
• from consumers to producers (prosumers)
• more democracy, less control
• it‘s about the user
• users are active, contribution is easy
• everybody can reach a broad audience
• networking, communication
• open, public, sharing

Is there also a
paradigm shift in the
creation of metadata?

#views
#favorites
ratings
tags
comments
http://aloe-project.de/

Information generated explicitly by users
• tags, comments, ratings
• relations (e.g., sets)
• profiles
• conversations
• …
gives an understanding of the individuals who
contributed (social browsing!)

Human Computation

http://www.espgame.org/

http://recaptcha.net/

Collective Intelligence

http://www.flickr.com/photos/azlijamil01/231592469/

Problems with metadata

“Metacrap” [Doctorow 2001]
• People lie
• People are lazy
• People are stupid
• Mission: Impossible – know thyself
• Schema’s aren’t neutral
• Metrics influence results
• There’s more than one way to describe something!

Metadata is context-dependent!
• description of a resource strongly depends on
- the role of a reader
- at what time the document is considered
- in which terminology and language it is written
- on which tasks he/she is currently working
- what expertise and experience is available
• valuable / bootless / annoyance?

Some philosophy…
Wittgenstein
‘Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache’
(‘The meaning of a word is its use in the language’)
Transferred into the world of (digital) resources:
‘The meaning of a resource is its use in the community’

Combining different ways
to generate metadata

How can metadata be generated?
• metadata generated by experts
• metadata generated by users and user interactions
- generated explicitly (e.g. tags, comments, ratings)
- collected by tracking and observation components
(sensors, log files, context information)
• metadata generated automatically
- content analysis
• statistic-based methods
• NLP
• ontology based approaches
• …
- inference

Benefits, weaknesses of the approaches
• expert metadata (centralistic approaches)
• expertise about respective domain, formats, standards
• cope with complex, difficult, time-consuming tasks
• expensive
• static (lifecycle? context?)
• often biased, subjective (motivations?)
• user generated metadata (distributed approaches)
• flat, simple ( cheap, fast)
• different opinions, viewpoints (collective intelligence)
• metadata generated automatically
• scalable
• restricted to the available knowledge
• usually only works reasonably well with text
[MemmelSchirruTomadakiWolpers2008]

Combine the strengths of
each approach!

Resource profiles – combining metadata

[Downes 2004]
Resource profiles
A ‘multi-faceted, wide ranging description of a resource’
which is characterised by the following features:
• not conform to a particular XML schema, but a patchwork of metadata formats
which are assembled as needed in order to form a description that is most
appropriate for the given resource
• not authored by a particular author - it consists of a large set of information
which is authored by many people
• may be distributed, in pieces, across a multitude of locations
• there is no single canonical or authoritative resource profile associated with a
given resource

http://aloe-project.de

ALOE – a social resource and metadata hub
• possibility to integrate and aggregate any kind of
existing resources and metadata
- wherever they is located
- via upload or reference (persistence?)
- not “just” several repositories
- not by a single authority!
• possibility to contribute new resources and metadata
• access, preview, (inline)player, editor…
• integration of advanced functionalities

Resource types
images
(bmp, gif, jpg, png, tif, …)
documents
(pdf, odt, odp, sxw, doc, ppt, …)
videos
(avi, mpeg, mov, …) web pages
audio
(aac, mp3, …)

Resource locations
• the Web
• intranet
• desktop
• …

ALOE – some features
• upload and share arbitrary types of digital resources
• share and organize bookmarks
• tag, rate, and comment on resources and bookmarks
• initiate groups and communicate with other users
• publish as private, public, or only for certain groups
• find resources with different types of search filters
• rank search results according to different criteria
• associate arbitrary metadata sets with resources
• Web Service API (SOAP, REST)

Application:
Tag Recommendations

Tag recommendations using multiple sources

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fliegender/sets/1161829

Thank you for your attention!
http://www.dfki.de/~memmel
http://elearningnuts.de
http://aloe-project.de