Eleventh ERCIM Database Research Group Workshop: Metadata for Web Databases
Karl Aberer, Brian J. Read · 1998
attracted significant interest among members of the working group, resulting in a very full day of presentations and discussion.There were sixteen participants from ten institutes. In the context of Web data management, database systems are mostly used in an isolated way as data sinks or sources. Data management services that exploit and support the connectivity of the Web require the interaction and co-operation of different data management components on the Web. To enable this the Web needs to be equipped with the metadata on structure and behaviour of Web data that these components require. Thus the workshop was intended to address such questions as the extraction, modelling and querying of metadata, so adding semantics to the use of web data. Keith Jeffery (CLRC-RAL) introduced the workshop topic by presenting an overview of the nature of metadata in databases, distinguishing its various purposes, and classifying it into three main kinds: schema, navigational and associative. Capturing metadata from the web presents problems as virtual pages generated from database queries are invisible to the large web crawlers. The limitations of HTML, and indeed XML, in managing metadata were discussed in this and several subsequent talks. Yannis Stavrakas (NTU-Athens) expanded on the nature of metadata for web-based information systems. He distinguished three perspectives corresponding to the atomic level (information within a page or document), the local level (the structure of a site and links between documents), and the global information space of the whole web. Terje Brasethvik (IDI/NTNU-Trondheim), currently in Paris, described his work with Arne Sølvberg on a Referent Model of Documents classified by semantic metadata. In this approach to sharing information on the web, they are developing a modelling language and editor to capture the meaning of documents.