Reading Notes Week 5

This week's readings focused on the concept of metadata or "data about data." The reading regarding the Dublin Core Data Model was one that was interesting to me. It noted that it was not a complete study, but a work in progress because of the subject matter. Metadata, is something that is very complex and hard to make a standard for internationally, but that is exactly what the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is trying to do, create a standard for metadata. 

The outline that DCMI used to attempt to make this possible is:

Internationalization: make it descriptive enough for other languages to understand without much issues.

Modularization/Extensibility: make it adaptable for future uses and systems.

Element Identity: to ensure that there are no name-collisions.

Semantic Refinement: to order elements into more specific meaningful ways for researchers/users.

Identification of coding schemes: this allows to be known what each part of the code does what, ridding the database of ambiguity.

Specification of controlled vocabularies: this is for the many disciplines that have complex and diverse vocabularies.

Identification of structured compound values: important for metadata and those that have the authority of the databases.

Something else to note in this article is anything can be a resource and can be uniquely identified, properties are specific types of resources, classes of objects are specific types of resources, and literals are text resources. The last one was the one that interested me the most: "literals are text resources," simply a line of text nothing more to it. It might not be the most important, but it struck me as interesting.

Mendeley Article

I have downloaded Mendeley before this class for this program as instructed by Dr. Tomer and Dr. Mahoney. I didn't know exactly how it works and to think that Mendeley uses "scrobbling" technology to use my preferences to create a "playlist" for me. That is one of the coolest things 

in my opinion. This allows the database to find articles and other documents that I would find interesting and useful for a research paper. The fact that I can also share my findings is an added bonus to the system. Another thing that makes Mendeley helpful is the fact that the system can link to other programs like Zotero, which can be helpful for users new and uncomfortable or even users who can't find what they're looking for.