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KMi Seminars
Experiences in Deploying Public Metadata Analysis Tools
This event took place on Friday 15 May 2009 at 11:30

Dr. David Nichols University of Waikato, New Zealand

Current institutional repository software provides few tools to help metadata librarians understand and analyse their collections. In this talk I will discuss two metadata analysis tools: the MAT tool from the New Zealand Digital Library Project at Waikato and the KRIS tool from the National Library of New Zealand. MAT is a public on-demand analyser that uses heuristics and visualisations to aid in metadata assessment. KRIS is part of a national discovery service for research held in institutional repositories and is based around agreed metadata guidelines. Experiences in building and deploying these tools provide a checklist of requirements for future metadata tool provision.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.