https://www.coursera.org/course/metadata
Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information
Dr. Jeffrey Pomerantz
Metadata is an unsung hero of the modern world, the plumbing that makes the information age possible. This course describes how Metadata is used as an information tool for the Web, for databases, and for the software and computing applications around us.
Workload: 4-6 hours/week
| September 2013 (8 weeks long) |
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About the Course
If you use nearly any digital technology, you make use of metadata. Use an ATM today? You interacted with metadata about your account. Searched for songs in iTunes or Spotify? You used metadata about those songs. We use and even create metadata constantly, but we rarely realize it. Metadata -- or data about data -- describes real and digital objects, so that those objects may be organized now and found later.
Metadata is a tool that enables the information age functions performed by humans as well as those performed by computers. Metadata is important to many fields, particularly Computer Science; but this course is not purely a Computer Science course. This course approaches Metadata from the perspective of Information Science, which is a broad interdisciplinary field that studies how people create and manage information.
Course Syllabus
Unit 1: Organizing Information
Unit 2: Dublin Core
Unit 3: How to Build a Metadata Schema
Unit 4: Alphabet Soup: Metadata Schemas That You (Will) Know and Love
Unit 5: Metadata for the Web
Unit 6: Metadata for Networks
Unit 7: How to Create Metadata
Unit 8: How to Evaluate Metadata
Recommended Background
Knowledge of HTML or HTML5 is a prerequisite for this course. If you are unsure if you meet this prerequsite, we recommend that you score at least 15 out of 20 on the
W3Schools’ HTML Quiz. If you find that you do not have this level of knowledge of HTML, many free online resources are available, including:
Suggested Readings
Metadata is central to Information Science -- without metadata, there would likely be
no Information Science. Consequently, a lot has been written about metadata. These are just a few of the many resources available.
Some good books (which are not required for this course) are:
Some other useful online resources are:
Course Format
This course will be 8 weeks long, each week dealing with a new topic. Each topic will consist of brief video lectures and demos, about 2 hours of total video per week. There will be occasional interviews with experts on various aspects of Metadata. Most videos will contain brief quizzes, to help students evaluate their own understanding. A graded test will be due each week, and a final exam will be included at the end of the course. Peer-graded assessments may be incorporated in the assignments.
