Free your Metadata!

This post is written by the FreeyourMetadata.org team from Belgium

Interested in what Linked Data could mean for your library, archive or museum but you don’t have a PhD in Semantic Web technologies? Don’t panic, the Free Your Metadata team is here to help!

On freeyourmetadata.org, we offer papers, tutorials and demos which are specifically geared towards content experts with a humanities background and an interest in Linked Data but who feel uncomfortable with its standards and technologies. On the project website, we focus on how a content expert can perform fundamental steps such as metadata cleaning, reconciliation, named entity recognition and the provision of a sustainable access to resources and their metadata by following REST principles. All of these steps and best practices are documented with the help of papers, screencasts and case-studies.That way, you can make your metadata available online in a sustainable manner for a wide ranger of data consumers.

Why are we doing this? The Free Your Metadata team is composed of young researchers who want to reach out to practitioners by bundling their specific expertise in the areas of metadata quality, semantic web technologies, computational linguistics and media enrichment. As everyone knows who’s acquainted with academia, young researchers are expected to deliver a maximum of A1 scientific papers, which are 1) sitting behind paywalls and 2) are written for a very limited specialist audience, making them a difficult (or at best a boring) read for the rest of the population. All members of Free Your Metadata proudly walk down the A1 path, but we feel strong about also hitting at some point the highway leading to a wider audience. As Ariel Rubinstein has mentioned, researchers should remember that we are one of the most privileged people on earth. Tax payers give us the freedom to do whatever we want, develop new ideas and express our opinions. Therefore, we owe something to society and that’s in a way also what the project is about.

What is the current status and roadmap for the next year? In 2011-2012 we focussed on documenting the cleaning and reconciliation process. The project was well received and we spent an extensive amount of time on the road in the US and Europe, meeting up with both researchers and practitioners at conferences and hands-on workshops. But the best is yet to come. We are currently preparing a relaunch of the project website, which will focus on a hands-on evaluation of named entity recognition (NER). A Google Refine extension for a NER framework is under development, which will allow a parallel use of NER service providers. Secondly, we are working in close collaboration with Seb Chan and Aaron Straup Cope of the fabulous Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum in order to showcase how cultural heritage collections can be provided in a RESTful manner. All this will be demonstrated and explained in non-technical terms on the website with papers, case-studies and tutorials.

Want to meet? The project is only as relevant as the case-studies we can offer. So if you have dirty metadata (we know you do!), lonesome keywords who need reconciliation or have multiple APIs making the life of your IT manager a hell, get in touch and let’s meet, or follow us on Twitter! We are currently setting up our tourschedule for Spring 2013. In April, we will be in Philadelphia at Penn state university and in June we’ll probably be in New York and Montréal. We want to get the most out of our transatlantic travels, so do get in touch if you want us to organize a workshop at your institution. We’re currently writing a Free Your Metadata song (this is not a joke, we’re aiming to bring out a Christmas hit under the working title “RESTful Christmas”), so you can also invite us to brighten up your conference or house party!”