Summary

In this chapter, we have described metadata and discussed possible solutions for modeling and managing metadata for the Web content. We have first outlined capabilities of XML as a metadata modeling language. XML’s verbosity makes the language human friendly, and simplifies processing documents written in it. As shown previously, XML has variety of application areas, and emerges as a good candidate for designing specifications and metadata models for institutions and businesses, education and research, publishing systems and communication protocols, and many more purposes and areas.

Later, we have classified metadata models for the Web content and discussed possible uses of each. Although XML and XML schema languages can define specifications, they only describe structure of information. XML Linking Languages (XLink) associates documents with each other and populates links with metadata, however, relationships between document contexts are neglected. We have looked at RDF and RDF-related languages within the concept of the Semantic Web and new ontologies around it as a solution to this problem.

Finally, we have listed and discussed several related works that address issues of metadata generation and management. From these works, we identified major characteristics that metadata repositories focus on as modeling, naming and discovery, authoring, persistence, and query of metadata.