Journal of Educational Media and Library Sciences


Vol. 43 No. 2 , Pages 129 - 152 , 2005

Metadata Schema Used in OCLC Sampled Web PagesUniversity

Fei YU

Abstract

The tremendous growth of Web resources has made information organization and retrieval more and more difficult. As one approach to this problem, metadata schemas have been developed to characterize Web resources. However, many questions have been raised about the use of metadata schemas such as which metadata schemas have been used on the Web? How did they describe Web accessible information? What is the distribution of these metadata schemas among Web pages? Do certain schemas dominate the others? To address these issues, this study analyzed 16,383 Web pages with meta tags extracted from 200,000 OCLC sampled Web pages in 2000. It found that only 8.19% Web pages used meta tags; description tags, keyword tags, and Dublin Core tags were the only three schemas used in the Web pages. This article revealed the use of meta tags in terms of their function distribution, syntax characteristics, granularity of the Web pages, and the length distribution and word number distribution of both description and keywords tags.

Keywords: metadata schema; meta tag; description; keyword; granularity; Web resource; Web page; information retrieval

[Index | Journal of Educational Media and Library Sciences | Other Journals | Subscription form | Enquiry ]


Mail any comments and suggestions to hkier-journal@cuhk.edu.hk .