DC-2004 Pre-Conference Workshop:

The Metadata Lifecycle: Creation, Management, Propagation and Use

Cataloging, or assigning metadata values to content, is perhaps the best-understood step in metadata creation. But forerunner activities such as content analysis, user studies, data modeling, and other infrastructure planning are crucial to creating sustainable and actionable metadata – and sometimes beset with ambiguity and goal conflict. Learn how to optimize the early stages of a metadata program for international and cross-cultural deployments.

Careful management ensures that your metadata investment is protected, that your users have easy access to application-specific data, that your schema is up-to-date and extensible. In the management phase, it is important to plan for maintenance, including change control and impact assessment. Managing metadata across multiple locations and tools presents additional challenges that must be addressed in management planning.

Without a well documented and repeatable process for sharing and transmitting the metadata model, adoption of it becomes less likely. The propagation process must account for both initial adoption of the metadata model as well as periodic updates. In addition, different consumers of the model may require customized versions, so the management and propagation of these must be accounted for as well.

The Workshop Program

Experts will present case studies about interesting applications of metadata, and then discuss issues related to metadata creation, management, and use in the enterprise. Panelists together with workshop participants will discuss five broad questions about enterprise applications and metadata:

      • How widely is Dublin Core used?
      • How has Dublin Core been extended (or reduced)?
      • What special tools (if any) are being used to create and manage metadata?
      • Are controlled vocabularies being used to fill-in metadata?
      • What guidelines are there for using specific DC elements such as subject, publisher, type, date, etc.?

All session will be moderated by Joseph Busch, Taxonomy Strategies.

Schedule

About the Moderator and Panelists

 Joseph A. Busch, Moderator and Expert
Joseph A. Busch is the Founder and a Principal of Taxonomy Strategies. He guides global 2000 companies, government agencies, and NGO’s in developing metadata frameworks and taxonomy strategies.

Mr. Busch is an authority in the field of information science, a Past President of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (www.asis.org), and a member of the Board of Directors of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.

He was a principal of the start-up company Metacode that was sold to the content management company Interwoven in 2000. With over a hundred customers, MetaTagger is now one of Interwoven’s three product lines.

Mr. Busch is a frequent speaker and the author of many articles on indexing, classification research, and information retrieval systems.

Jack Aaronson, Expert
Jack Aaronson is the CEO of The Aaronson Group as well as a corporate lecturer. The Aaronson Group's expertise includes multi-channel user experience and user-centric design. As a corporate lecturer, Jack also travels around the world teaching companies how to effectively implement personalization, loyalty programs and multi-channel CRM. Jack writes the CRM column for ClickZ.com, and has his own newsletter about personalization and multi-channel marketing.

The Aaronson Group's current clients include ShopNBC, WeightWatchers.com, Bank of America, Lincoln Financial Group and Dell Computers.

Jack has been working in the Personalization and One-to-One Marketing field since 1996. Prior to starting his own company, Mr. Aaronson created Barnes&Noble.com’s personalization practice in 1999. As Director of Personalization, he was responsible for the vision and strategy for personalization on the site, for designing all personalized features, and for overseeing their project management. At Barnes&Noble.com, Mr. Aaronson created over 20 personalization projects, ranging from Editor Pages and Special Interest Communities, to the highly-successful Wishlist, which held over 17 million dollars worth of products in less than six months, and a new breed of recommendation engine, which more than tripled traffic to recommended products.

An expert in the industry, Jack has keynoted conferences, and has been hired to consult CEOs around the world on such topics as Personalization, Email Marketing Strategies, Multi-Channel Marketing, eCRM, and "The Unconscious Consumer", from his forthcoming book. He has consistently been voted “Best Speaker” at every conference he has spoken at. He has lectured classes at Wharton School of Business, Columbia Business School, NYU Stern School of Business, University of Malaga (Spain), University of Southampton (U.K.) and Amherst College.

Bradley P. Allen, Expert
Bradley P. Allen is founder and CTO of Siderean Software. Mr. Allen began his career as a member of the research staff at Carnegie-Mellon's Robotics Institute. In 1984, he joined Inference Corporation where he created CBR Express, one of the first case-based problem resolution products. He left Inference in 1995 to co-found Limbex Corporation where he created WebCompass, an Internet search assistant that won Best Of Show at COMDEX Fall '95. Quarterdeck Corporation acquired Limbex in 1996. In 1997, Mr. Allen co-founded TriVida Corporation and served as CTO until TriVida's acquisition by Be Free, Inc. in March 2000. Mr.

Allen earned a BS in applied mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1982.

Breanna Anderson, Expert
Breanna Anderson is a founder and Chief Technical Officer of SchemaLogic, a Redmond, Washington software company. Ms. Anderson is the architect of SchemaLogic's complete suite of enterprise metadata management solutions. SchemaLogic’s suite of products constitute one of the first commercially available solutions to encompass taxonomy creation and management, and structural schema management for data and metadata standards for large or distributed organizations.

Prior to SchemaLogic, Ms. Anderson was a software architect and program manager at Microsoft from 1995 to 2001. While at MSNBC Interactive, she created one of the first enterprise scale web news publishing systems. At MSN and Microsoft.com, Breanna championed and delivered a series of groundbreaking enterprise CMS, web publishing, modeling and collaboration platforms and systems vital to Microsoft's public facing web properties.

Arthur Haynes, Expert
Arthur Haynes is Principal Data Architect within BBC Technology Ltd., leading a team of data analysts. The group provides a general data integration service for the BBC as well as supplying a wide range of direct data analysis help for projects both within BBC Technology and with its clients. He has worked in the IS/IT industry for over 30 years across a wide range of industries. Over the last few years he has specialised in Data Management implementations.

Lynne Howarth, Expert
Lynne Howarth, MLS, PhD, is Dean of the Faculty Of Information Studies, University of Toronto. She teaches organization of information and materials, creation and organization of bibliographic records, and administration of technical services. She is a voting member of the ALCTS/CCS Committee on Cataloguing: Description and Access (CC:DA), and is currently chairing a Task Force to review proposed revisions to the International Standard Bibliographic Description for Computer Files (ISBD (CF)).

Jon Mason, Expert

Jon Mason is an Executive Consultant with education.au limited, a non-profit Australian government agency that specializes in managing nationally scoped collaborative projects and services associated with information and communications technologies in learning, education and training. His primary focus is on advocacy and development of interoperability standards relevant to Internet-enabled education and training in Australia. Since 2000 he has played a pivotal role in developing Australian engagement in international e-learning specifications and standards development. He chairs the Standards Australia IT-019-1 Committee, heads the Australian delegation to ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36, IT in Learning, Education and Training, and is an active participant in the IMS Global Learning Consortium and the IEEE LTSC. He co-chaired the DC-Education Working Group from 1999-2002 and is a member of the DCMI Advisory Board. Jon has published numerous papers on e-learning and standards development and he also performs various editorial roles. He is currently the Technical Editor for the IEEE Digital Rights Expression Languages Recommended Practice and is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Learning Technology. In 2003 he co-authored Transforming E-Knowledge – a book that provides international perspective on the common ground shared by e-learning, knowledge management, standards development, and organizational transformation.

Eric Miller, Expert
Eric Miller is the Activity Lead for the W3C World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web Initiative. Eric's responsibilities include the architectural and technical leadership in the design and evolution of Semantic Web infrastructure. Responsibilities additionally include working with W3C Working Group members so that both working groups in the Semantic Web activity, as well as other W3C activities, produce Web standards that support Semantic Web requirements. Additionally, to build support among user and vendor communities for the Semantic Web by illustrating the benefits to those communities and means of participating in the creation of a metadata-ready Web. And finally to establish liaisons with other technical standards bodies involved in Web-related technology to ensure compliance with existing Semantic Web standards and collect requirements for future W3C work. Before joining the W3C, Eric was a Senior Research Scientist at OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. and the co-founder and Associate Director of the The Dublin Core Metdata Initiative, an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. Eric is a Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.