"To develop a novel and innovative method for automatically augmenting existing metadata sets to support interdisciplinary research in the social sciences and humanities"

Digging into Metadata (IMSL/JISC/AHRC/ESRC Digging into Data Challenge: 2012-2014). The project was one of the winners of the 2011 Digging into Data Challenge, a competition to promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. 

The project is a collaboration between the University of South Wales and the MIMAS Data Centre based at The University of Manchester, together with the University of Drexel in Philadelphia.

This competition is jointly funded by eight funding agencies from Canada, Netherlands, United Kingdom (JISC, AHRC and ESRC) and the United States. This round, 67 teams applied, and 14 were funded. 

Digging into Metadata builds on outcomes from the previous JISC funded PERTAINS project. Doug Tudhope is PI and Ceri Binding is the Research Fellow for our part of the project. 

Objectives

• To develop an understanding of Social Sciences & Humanities researchers’ information behaviours and needs to generate user requirements and feedback for the project
• To analyse data from the four participating repositories using the PERTAINS tool to generate recommended Dewey Decimal Classification-based tags
• To research options for aggregating, clustering and indexing the tags across repositories
• To develop a search interface prototype and visualisation tools, subject to usability testing and ongoing evaluation
• To add more complex metadata sources to the tagging process, to provide augmented content.

For more information, see the Digging into Metadata website

Major Project Publications

Augmenting Dublin Core digital library metadata with Dewey Decimal Classification (author version)

Khoo, M., Ahn, J-W., Binding, C., Jones, H., Lin, X., Massam, D. & Tudhope, D. 2015. Journal of Documentation. 71, 5, p. 976-998 23 p

Mapping Metadata to DDC Classification Structures for Searching and Browsing (author version)

Tudhope, D., Binding, C., Lin, X., Khoo, M., Ahn, J-W., Massam, D. & Jones, H. 31 Mar 2017. International Journal on Digital Libraries. p. 25--39