Winner of LIBRI Best Student Paper Award 1999 The First Monday Metadata Project
Robin Henshaw · Libri · 1999
Publicly available web pages number over 100 million and this number will continue to grow in the foreseeable future. This fact serves to aggravate the increasing difficulty of finding information on the Internet. The application of metatags in the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) header of a web page is one method employed by web site developers and authors to help users locate information on the site. Through the use of a search engine, the user can then locate more relevant matches because metatags relating to the site's contents are used to index and describe the site. A metadata policy for First Monday, a peer-reviewed journal on the Internet, was developed and implemented, with the goal of increasing the ranking of a selected group of articles in some search engines. In the article, metadata and metatags are defined, and an introduction to the Dublin Core Initiative is given. The philosophy and structure of First Monday's metadata is discussed, including syntax-specific examples. The practical application viewpoint taken in this project also necessitated an examination of Internet search engines currently indexing on metatags. The paper concludes with preliminary research conclusions on the utility of the tags to articles in First Monday.