User Generated Metadata: Connecting the Communities

At the eighth International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2008 (DC-2008) Wikimedia Germany organized a workshop on user generated metadata. The workshop took place at Friday, the 26th of September 2008. 13:30 - 17:00 at the Humboldt University Berlin, Universitätsgebäude am Hegelplatz, Dorotheenstraße 24, Room 1.102.

During the recent years several projects like Wikipedia, LibraryThing, and OpenStreetmap have emerged on the Web. This projects enable volunteers to collect and create structured data such as bibliographies, encyclopaedic factsheets, geodata etc. However connections and exchange between different projects is still limited to seperated initiatives. Therefore Wikimedia Germany wants to bring together projects and communities on a workshop on user generated metadata. To enhance collaboration, we want to share experiences in the creation and management of communities and metadata. Standards and tools to simplify the exchange and connection with other institutions will be discussed as well as aspects of quality, rights, and privacy.

The workshop consisted of five presentations of several projects (OpenStreetmap, Wikipedia/DBpedia, BibSonomy, and The Open Library) and second a moderated podium to deeper discuss common general issues: How can we best connect and reuse user generated metadata among communities? Which data silos must be opened? What are the limits of cooperation? How can sustainability be established in dynamic communities? etc. Around 40 visitors of the conference participated in the workshop.

Agenda

13:30-14:00 OpenStreetMap (Jochen Topf) - slides

14:00-14:30 Bibsonomy (Andreas Hotho) - slides

14:30-15:00 Wikipedia (Daniel Kinzler) - slides

15:00-15:30 break

15:30-15:45 DBPedia (Georgi Kobilarov) - slides

15:45-16:15 The Open Library (Karen Coyle) - slides

16:15-17:00 discussion

The presentations slides are also available in one PDF.

More information

http://dc2008.de/ - Dublin Core Conference 2008
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core_Conference_2008 - this page
http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Program/Wikimedia_and_libraries - related events at Wikimania 2008

Questions for the discussion

The following issues and questions had been prepared in advance for the discussion

Rights and Licenses

Some projects provide their full data under a free license (Wikimedia), others only provide free access and usage. Copyright law does not adequately cover data, so new licenses (Talis Community Licence, Open Data Commons License...) are on their way. On the other hand institutions need funding for managing metadata. What is the best way to license the usage of metadata?

Sources

In collaborative systems content is provided and/or managed by user, but there are many other sources of metadata (govermental institutions, libraries, companies ...). How can these source be used collaboratively? Is it enough just to get the data in any form on regular basis? Which sources are worth to open?

Management and Editing

Collaboratively editing a text in a wiki is one thing but metadata can be much more complex. How do you store metadata, how do you make it editable, how do you deal with vandalism etc.? Is a wiki the right tool for everything? What basic functions (user management, version history, blocking ...) are needed to manage metadata? How can metadata editors for users best support them?

Authority and Quality

If anyone can create and edit metadata, who takes responsibility and guarantees the quality? How can you determine and measure the quality of metadata? Do we need to track provenance and how can this be done? Is vandalism and forgery a serious problem and how can we prevent it?

Contol

Should everything be open to be edited by everyone or do we still need authorities that define general rules? Although anyone can edit, only some users edit in a given area - who defines the content in practise? Are there hidden structures of power in a community?

Formats and tools

To facilitate exchange and reusability of metadata, common metadata formats and are needed. Which formats are used in practise and which will be used in the future? On which standards must and can we agree upon? Which tools to extract, convert, merge etc. metadata from and into collaborative systems exist?