Opportunities and challenges in enhancing access to metadata of cultural heritage collections: a survey

摘要

Machine processable data that narrate digital/non-digital resources are termed as metadata. Different metadata standards exist for describing various types of digital objects. Several researches have reported on how to address issues related to accessing of metadata resources. Most studies on metadata involve cultural heritage domain, and this is an indication of the importance of this domain in metadata research and development. Research on metadata in cultural heritage mainly revolves around three fundamental issues: (1) lack of quality in metadata contents in most of the cases, (2) difficulty in accessing metadata contents due largely to limited user’s knowledge on the content of the metadata, and (3) heterogeneity of the data at the level of schemas which makes the access even more difficult. The lack of quality in metadata makes it difficult for the users to retrieve and explore information that satisfies their needs. So, in order to make its contents more accessible, enhancing the metadata content is required, especially for cultural heritage collections which consist of digital objects (structured documents) described by a variety of metadata schemas. This paper presents issues and challenges in enhancing access to metadata by reviewing the existing approaches in metadata environment with a particular emphasis on cultural heritage collections. In this paper, firstly, we look at the classification of metadata which is divided into two categories namely data retrieval and information retrieval. Then, we present the analysis, findings and suggestions on how to address issues in enhancing access to metadata contents especially in cultural heritage collections. A detailed comparison is given between information retrieval and data retrieval, and it focuses on the applicability of one approach over the other. A framework that aims to improve the effectiveness of retrieval when searching metadata is also proposed and tested. The proposed framework consists of approaches and methods that are expected to enhance access to metadata especially in cultural heritage collections and be useful for those with limited knowledge on cultural heritage. The experiments were conducted on CHiC2013 which is a collection on cultural heritage. The results show a considerable enhancement over other IR approaches that use the expansion methods.