Rob Hanna presented on metadata for technical communicators. The presentation covered defining metadata as "data about data" and its value in improving findability, automation, access and administration of content. It discussed different types of metadata like administrative, classification, processing and descriptive metadata. The presentation also provided guidance on managing metadata through establishing single sources of truth, minimizing manual metadata creation and correcting metadata sources. Advanced topics included metadata standards and using taxonomies and ontologies. The presentation concluded with demonstrating some free and open source tools for metadata management.

1. Metadata Primer for Technical Communicators Presenter: Rob Hanna Information Architect, Innovatia Inc

2. About your presenter Rob Hanna 15 years experience as a technical communicator 10 years in content management STC Associate Fellow Vice-Chair of the STC Certification Commission Innovatia, Inc Headquartered in Saint John, New Brunswick 400+ employees in Canada, U.S., Europe, and India Lines of business include Technical Publications, Technical Support, and e-Learning $7 Million Research and Development Fund

3. Agenda What is Metadata? Managing Metadata Advanced Topics in Metadata Tools for Metadata Management Questions

4. What is Metadata?

5. Metadata Defined Coined in the 1960’s by Jack Myers Data about Data Stuff about Stuff Essential properties stored within the content or external to the content that identify and define context, history, and management of the content

6. Application of Metadata Metadata is applied to all structured and unstructured content in a corpus visible to the user or it can be hidden from view both machine-driven and manually entered internal or external to the content mandatory, optional, or conditional

7. Value of Metadata Findability Automation Access Administration Disposition Disambiguation

8. Understanding Metadata Administrative Metadata Metadata used for handling of content includes author, date, status, location, access Classification Metadata Metadata used to index content across a corpus includes subject, keywords, index terms Processing Metadata Metadata used by machines to process and display content includes font display, multimedia, and PIs Relational Metadata Metadata used to relate pieces of content includes links, related topics, maps Descriptive Metadata Metadata used for search and retrieval of content includes title, short description, document ID Structural Metadata Metadata used to ensure consistency and order of semantic meaning includes markup tags for XML, HTML

9. Managing Metadata

10. Finding Metadata Metadata is everywhere – you just need to know where to look for it Microsoft Office Files PDFs XML/HTML Images Databases Card catalogs On every page

11. Establishing a Single Source of Truth for Metadata As with content, metadata must be managed from a single source of truth As far as possible, metadata should stay within the source Do not introduce opportunities for ambiguity Develop a Metadata Strategy

12. Creating Metadata Minimize the human interaction with the creation of metadata Where metadata is entered by a user, do not use “optional” metadata – use “mandatory” Embed metadata directly in the content Rely on machine-generated metadata where possible Edit/audit manual metadata regularly

13. Correcting Metadata Sources Extract Metadata Normalize Metadata Replace Metadata

14. Advanced topics in Metadata

15. Metadata Standards Dublin Core XMP eXtensible Metadata Platform XIF eXcellent Image Format RDF Resource Definition Framework

16. Taxonomies and Ontologies Taxonomies organize similar types of information into an order and hierarchy for classification Ontologies organize disparate taxonomies as facets on content, creating a multi-dimensional model for classification

17. Tools for Metadata Management

18. Tools Presentation Freeware/Shareware XIF tools Acrobat XMP Microsoft Excel LoremIpsum DITA Generator DITA Metadata Extractor Basic Excel functions

19. Questions Thank you for attending Rob Hanna rob.hanna@innovatia.net @singlesourceror http://innovatia.net/blogs/single_sourceror