Dear colleagues, Looking for hands-on information on how to clean up your metadata and bring them into the Linked Data cloud? We have just launched http://freeyourmetadata.org, which aims to promote the use of Google Refine by curators, librarians, cataloguers, metadata managers and collection holders at large to reconcile their own locally developed with controlled vocabularies which are already a part of the Linked Data cloud, such as the LCSH. We only make use of freely available metadata and non-expert tools, in order to stimulate semantic web novices to start playing with their own metadata.
Currently, the website features a detailed screencast on the metadata profiling and clean-up possibilities of Google Refine, by using the metadata from the Powerhouse Museum: http://freeyourmetadata.org/cleanup/. The screencast regarding the reconciliation of a locally developed vocabulary (or even free-text keywords) with the LCSH will be published shortly on the website. In-depth information regarding the cleaning of metadata and the reconciliation process with the LCSH can be found in our research paper, downloadable at http://freeyourmetadata.org/publications/freeyourmetadata.pdf. We will be giving talks in Europe in November (see http://freeyourmetadata.org/join/), and are currently busy setting up dates for some workshops in the US and Canada in February-March-April 2012. Don't hesitate to contact us if you want to co-organize a workshop/tutorial at your institution or conference, we'll be more than happy to help you free your metadata! Kind regards, Ruben Verborgh (Multimedia Lab, Ghent University) Max De Wilde (MaSTIC, Universit? Libre de Bruxelles) Seth van Hooland (MaSTIC, Universit? Libre de Bruxelles) Seth van Hooland Master en Sciences et Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication (MaSTIC) | Universit? Libre de Bruxelles Av. F.D. Roosevelt, 50 CP 123 | 1050 Brussels - Belgium http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~svhoolan/ http://mastic.ulb.ac.be 0032 2 650 4765 Office: DC11.113
