E.P.O.D

What is structured data ?

  Coursera Class / Chapel Hill Organizing and Discovering Information Course

Well here we are, halfway through the Metadata MOOC! As I mentioned in the videos, Units 4, 5, and 6 are more or less a sequence. We are building on the logic of the Dublin Core data model from Unit 2, and the technical underpinning of XML and RDF from Unit 3. Unit 4 was, as they say, a mile wide and an inch deep: a survey across a range of schemas and thesauri, created for a range of use cases. Unit 5 will explore one approach to metadata in more detail: microdata. Microdata is metadata specifically for the web. But what you have to keep in mind is this: while the web is of course used by people, the web is also used by algorithms. Microdata is metadata for the web... but it's not really meant for people, it's designed for use by algorithms. What algorithms? Search tools, of course, but really, you name it. Any algorithm that can make use of structured data. All of which will lead us to Linked Data in Unit 6, which applies the idea of structured data on the w...

Christopher Eck, The latest information from  Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information  by  The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill  on Coursera. Congratulations on surviving the first week of Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information! As some of you have noted on the discussion forums, unit 1 was pretty long. But don't panic! Unit 1 is the longest unit -- all of the remaining units are shorter (though some units are longer than others). Many MOOCs (including this one) are created for a broad general audience: maybe you have some background in Information Science, and if so, great! But I wanted to create this course to be accessible even to students with no Information Science background. Which is why unit 1 was so long: I tried to fill in some of that background. And hopefully pique your interest in Information Science! But now that that background is background, we'll start building on it. In unit 2, we will look at our first ex...