Google’s own webmasters help site recommends microformats and RDFa structured data to improve indexing and usefulness of the data. Review metadata appears to have full support, while people, product, and business data are in beta.

Now that I’ve discovered it, I’m tempted to try TuneUp on my collection of MP3s downloaded as podcasts (and without good ID3 tags) from places like the KCRW’s Today’s Top Tune. The story is that the iTunes plugin automatically identifies your tracks, can fix the tags, and add album art.

Facebook’s guide to sharing details some meta tags to make that sharing work better:

In order to make sure that the preview is always correctly populated, you should add the tags shown below to your html. An example news story could have the following:

<meta name="title" content="Smith hails 'unique' Wable legacy" />
<meta name="description" content="John Smith claims beautiful football is the main legacy of Akhil Wable's decade at the club. " />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://www.onjd.com/design05/images/PH2/WableAFC205.jpg" />

As shown, title contains the preview title, description contains the preview summary and image_src contains the preview image. Please make sure that none of the content fields contain any html markup because it will be stripped out. For consistency’s sake, please use the <meta> tag to provide text data for the preview, and the <link> tag for any source urls.

The title and summary tags are the minimum requirements for any preview, so make sure to include these two.

Declaration of Metadata Independance:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Metadata is essential to all Users, and that the Creation of Metadata endows certain inalienable Rights, that among these are the right to collect, the right to share and the pursuit of Happiness through the reuse of the Metadata… (read more)

Via.

There can be no arguments about it, machine tags are cool and they solve problems. And now they work in WordPress with bSuite too (svn only, for the moment).

It’s not just because flickr popularized them that I like them, though it helps and you should definitely look at that stuff:

• The announcement
• Excitement from O’Reilly Radar, ProgrammableWeb, and Dan Catt (who championed the concept at flickr, I think).

Part of what I like about machine tags is that they bring some more structure (but not too much) to the folksonomic ecosystem. I’m not sure how many of the 292 named flickr mashups use machine tags, but there’s a lot of possibility in them.

For my part, I added machine tag support to bSuite because Scriblio needed it. And it was a message on the Scriblio mail list that kicked me into gear to make it work.

(It’s old, but I just stumbled into it again…) Karen Calhoun’s report, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, included a lot of things I agree with, but it also touched something I’m a bit skeptical about: automated metadata production.

Some interviewees noted that today’s catalogs are put together mainly by humans and that this approach doesn’t scale. Several urged building or expanding the scope of catalogs by using automated methods.

And she highlighted this quote in particular:

If you put the money you’re spending on LCSH in automatic classification, you might get something more competitive in the Google world and get better subject access too.

Whoa.

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t looking carefully at LCSH and our cataloging norms, but the notion of entirely giving up on them is a bit dramatic for me.

For the moment, our rich metadata — primarily the LCSH — is one of the best (and least tapped) assets in our catalogs. If the goal is competing with Google[1] or getting better subject access, then what we should start with is building OPACs that leverage this data first, then figure out how our cataloging practice should evolve to serve that new need.

Our systems aren’t hard to use because our cataloging is bad, they’re hard to use because we’ve not invested in their development and ease of use.

[1] Is the goal really to compete with Google? I’m more interested in how can we leverage those search engines to improve service to our users.

[tags]automation, computer generated metadata, metadata, libraries, lib20, library 2.0, OPAC, library catalogs, ease of use[/tags]

Eleta explained it this way, and credited it to R. David Lankes:

Your data:

Your metadata:

CANDY BAR, data, metadata, metaphor

Oliver Brown introduced me to microformats a while ago, the Ryan Eby got excited about them, then COinS-PMH showed how useful they could be for libraries, but I still haven’t done anything with them myself (other than beg Peter Binkley to release his COinS-PMH WordPress Plugin).

What are microformats? Garrett Dimon explains the theory:

When writing markup against deadlines and priorities, it’s easy to forget that somebody else will eventually have to maintain it. Conveniently, some of the central ideas behind microformats revolve around the fact that they are designed for humans first and created with simplicity in mind. This means you’ll have markup that is easy to understand and maintain for everyone, including:

• The engineer integrating your code next week
• You updating your code next month
• The new guy taking over your job when you get promoted next year

Basically, microformats suggest the use of common class names for various XHTML elements. As it turns out, the hCard microformat is a convenient way of representing the data from vCards in XHTML. The convenience is by design, of course. Here’s an example:

<div class=“vcard”>
<a class=“url fn” href=“http://maisonbisson.com/”>Casey Bisson</a>
<div class=“org”>MaisonBisson</div>
</div>

By standardizing the class names for this content, it’s easier to share and maintain stylesheets, re-use content, and read the content programatically. Perhaps most importantly, it offers valuable tips to search engines crawling your site about what the data is, making it more findable.

The principles of microformats are such:

• solve a specific problem
• design for humans first, machines second
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• modularity / embeddability
• enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services

The potential here for libraries is huge, but we should take seriously the caution that microformats be easy to use and the design rule that it be simple.

microformat, networked information, semantic web, microformats, library, libraries, metadata, data standards

I’d meant to point out these two articles from Library Journal ages ago, but now that I’m putting together my presentations for next week (NEASIS&T & NELINET), I realized I hadn’t.

Roy Tennant writes in Doing Data Differently that “our rich collections of metadata are underused.” While Roland Dietz & Carl Grant, in the same issue, bemoan the dis-integrated world of library systems.

tags: dis-integration, integration, libraries, library journal, library systems, metadata, using metadata

I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more.

My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the “maps.google” or “multimap.com” URLs, fishes the latitude and longitude out of them, and adds some geocoding tags to the body of the post.

Take a look at how it works with these posts in my archive…

You should see one or more blocks of links like the following (from my Osceola Weekend post):

geolocation: geo:lat=44.006336, geo:lon=-71.547260, geotagged, geolocation:44.006336,-71.547260 geobloggers

Go ahead and click the “geobloggers” link. I could have added these links using the old Geo plugin, but I still would have had to insert the coordinates separately. Actually, that brings up a good point: my code also inserts post metadata in the same format the Geo plugin uses, so I can take advantage of all the good functions it has, like the one that inserts the “<meta name=“ICBM” content=“44.006336, -71.547260” />” tag in the header of this post (caveat: I had to disable the add_action code in Geo that feeds the postmeta table, as it was conflicting my code).

I’m releasing this now, to start some public discussion, but please recognize that it’s a very early beta.

Download: bsuite_geocode.zip
Install: place unzipped “bsuite_geocode.php” file in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it via the WP control panel. See the WordPress Codex for more detail.
Use: write posts as usual, adding links to Google Maps or MultiMap as appropriate. Links to those sites that have latitude and longitude components will be used to geocode the post.

Example of a working URL:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=19.355507,-155.072365&spn=.191780,.318003&t=k&hl=en

Example of a URL that won’t work (note how there’s no “ll=”):

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=decker+canyon+rd,+malibu+california&spn=0.019857,0.039750&hl=en

I’ve got a lot of features and uses in mind, so consider this only a start. Please post bugs and suggestions in the comments.

Also, see these previous posts on geolocating the news or geolocating everything or just search the archives to understand why I’m so excited about things like this.

tags: beta, blog, blogmap, blogmaps, blog gis, geo, geocoding, geolocation, geotagging, gis, google maps, lat, latitude and longitude, lon, map, maps, mapping, metadata, multimap, plugin, plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugin, wp plugin

A an old John Udell piece at InfoWorld hints at GeoURLs, but the GoeURL site is down, and has been for a while. The concept sounds interesting: you mark pages with coordinates, then use GIS to map those pages to geographic locations, finding pages and people of interest along the way.

To join GeoURL, you add this kind of metadata to your homepage:

<META name=“ICBM” content=“42.93564,-72.27239”>
<META name=“DC.title” content=“Jon Udell”>

I got interested in this sort of thing (geolocation) a while back, and I haven’t quite given up.

Update: Bjørn is right, GeoURL is back and I should have updated this post ages ago. Look here for more about geolocation on MaisonBisson. …And Bjørn’s website is worth a look too.

Technorati Tags: geographic, geolocation, gis, map, metadata, semantic web