After several hundred hours viewing the source code of a few thousand web pages, and then another several hundred hours writing up the data (not to mention the literature review) I’m finally rewarded. Information Processing & Management decided to publish the article I wrote with Professor Jin Zhang of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. As the body of the text is just about as scintillating as the title, “A Study of the Metadata Creation Behavior of Different User Groups on the Internet,” I only know of two people who’ve actually read it… my parents.
Here’s the abstract:
Metadata is designed to improve information organization and information retrieval effectiveness and efficiency on the Internet. The way web publishers respond to metadata and the way they use it when publishing their web pages, however, is still a mystery. The authors of this paper aim to solve this mystery by defining different professional publisher groups, examining the behaviors of these user groups, and identifying the characteristics of their metadata use. This study will enhance the current understanding of metadata application behavior and provide evidence useful to researchers, web publishers, and search engine designers.
Our second paper (about patterns in metadata elements that show up together in the source code of these web pages) has been accepted by Online Information Review, though there’s no word yet on when the article will actually be published. And little by little I’m still collecting data for one (or two) more papers.
Congrats on getting published (and on the new blog)! I’m in the middle of reading your article, so I guess I might count as 2.5. I’m by no means an expert on metadata, but I haven’t gotten lost yet. I believe in the merit of good metadata, and hopefully, others may now be inspired to as well.