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Metadata & search exercises


These exercises are part of the Metadata and Search course. Using your own metadata submitted on a series of worksheets, you can see how your content, keywords, and categories perform in a full text search engine and compare the results with an A - Z index created by a human indexer.

The seven exercises are described below:

1. A - Z index comparison. Using the Montague Institute's A - Z index format, compare the results of human indexing with results produced by a search engine. Show users why human indexing works best for some research tasks, while a full text search engine works best for others.


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Montague Institute A - Z index. When you click on a term in the left frame, associated documents and cross references are displayed in the right frame.

In this exercise you'll compare the documents indexed by a person with those found by a full text, metadata-aware search engine.


2. Thesaurus editing. Many search engines and content management systems can store thesaurus terms, but updating is difficult. This exercise illustrates how a taxonomist can use a metadata repository to efficiently store and update thesaurus terms while using the search engine's crawler as an editing tool.


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Thesaurus editing. The "Indexed Documents" list, produced from the metadata repository, shows each document assigned by a human indexer.

The "Ultraseek results" list shows all the documents found by the search engine for a specific term in the metadata repository.


3. Search engine cross references. Export your thesaurus terms as an XML file and see how Ultraseek uses it to create cross references and automatically expand a search to handle variations in names.


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Search engine cross references. Many search engines use an XML thesaurus file to display cross references (shown here in a red circle).

The "thesaurus" is also used to expand a search without displaying a cross reference. For example, the user can find documents for "AICPA" and "American Institute of Certified Public Accounts" by typing either term in the search box.

4. Navigation links. See how to create custom navigation links in a search engine using relationships from your metadata repository.


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Quicklinks and topic hierarchy. A Quicklink takes the user to a page that an editor has deemed to be especially valuable for a search term.

Some search engines allow you to create categories and specify which documents should be displayed for each of them. The search engine will automatically produce a "bread crumb trail" of topics as shown here.

click image to enlarge 		Best Bets. For each topic or category, you can select documents to appear at the top of the results lists. Selected documents ("Best Bets") are marked with an icon (red star at left).


5. Manage document metadata. Your metadata repository can be configured to scan the pages on your Web site, extract their metadata, and display the results in a spreadsheet format. Then, you can easily see which values need to be added or changed. This feature is included in many content management programs.


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Manage document metadata. Search engines use document metadata to make search results more accurate, but over time metadata values can become inaccurate or obsolete.

This exercise illustrates how you can use a metadata repository as a content management tool to identify metadata that needs editing.

6. Federated search. See how your Web site search can be used along with others in a federated search function such as Amazon.com's A9 OpenSearch.


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Federated search combines search results from multiple search services in one display.

With Amazon's OpenSearch, users can select which search services they want to use (see boxes at the top). Results from the Montague Institute's Ultraseek search are listed in the column at the right.


7. Taxonomy maintenance. This exercise shows how to use a metadata repository to create and maintain controlled vocabularies, thesauri, and ontologies. Storing taxonomy values in an external repository makes them easier to maintain and use for multiple applications, including search.


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Taxonomy maintenance. You'll use this Web-based tool to create, update, and extend your taxonomy. Special functions let you export a thesaurus.xml file, search external Web sites, and perform a search using a specific thesaurus term.

Unlike other metadata repositories, you can also store metadata about people, documents, and standardized names.

Created on July 18, 2006 l Updated on August 7, 2006

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