Course Description: Principles, skills and practices in the conceptualization and implementation of metadata systems with a focus on semantic web. Project-based exploration of domain and abstract data modeling, attribute/value space definition, and machine encoding decision.

Statement of purpose, functional requirements and domain model

The class centered on an imaginary project with the central aim of giving access to archival materials held by the Library of Congress and/or their digital representations. Beginning from public EAD descriptions of actual LoC archives for Susan B. Anthony and others, the project set a goal of exposing those resources via metadata intended to facilitate navigation by internal systems and others across the Semantic Web within collection sets and across collections. As a secondary goal, the project sought to enable interoperability of navigation aids for those collections with resources external to the institution.
Complete document (.doc, 95k) – Category: Information Processing – All Coursework

Attribute space definition

This text document details namespaces referenced in the application, attributes it defines, and properties allowed for those attributes, including controlled vocabularies as required.
Complete document (.doc, 489k) – Category: Information Processing – All Coursework

Susan B. Anthony
Source: Library of Congress.

Description set template expressed in xml

This xml file encodes the attribute space definition in a machine-readable way, defining the rules for automated processing of the semantic data.
Description set template (.xml, 34k) – Category: Information Processing, Information Technology – All Coursework

Description instance encoded in RDF-xml

This xml file encodes sample data from the LoC EAD files in RDF-xml format, allowing automated processing of the semantic data.
Sample instance (.xml, 25k) – Category: Information Processing, Information Technology – All Coursework

Usage guidelines for description properties

This text document details in human-readable form the limitations and requirements for using the application’s xml tools to promote semantically appropriate use of the data.
Complete document (.doc, 123k) – Category: Information Processing – All Coursework