Print Email Facebook Twitter Scenario-based Metadata Design for Open Data User Interaction Title Scenario-based Metadata Design for Open Data User Interaction Author Liang, W. Contributor Houben, G.J.P.M. (mentor) Janssen, M.F.W.H.A. (mentor) Hidders, A.J.H. (mentor) Zuiderwijk-van Eijk, A. (mentor) Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Software and Computer Technology Programme Web Information Systems Date 2014-07-18 Abstract The potential value of open data is said to stimulate innovation, promote economic growth, and contribute to transparency, accountability and citizen participation. In spite of numerous advantages of open data, considerable impediments hinder the provision and use of open data. One category of impediments is related to metadata which is considered as key enablers for the effective reuse of open data. The metadata provides descriptive, contextual and other detailed information which interprets the user’s purpose when he or she makes use of open data. Unfortunately, current descriptive metadata can barely provide contextual information, which is required to interpret open data. Users could not explore the open data resource themselves to determine if the open data resource would be worth working with for their purposes. Metadata about the conditions under which the open data has been gathered, who has provided the open data and how to use the open data are possible factors that can influence the appropriateness of the open data. However the absence of contextual metadata model results in ambiguous semantics of the open data and unawareness of the datasets by users. The objective of this thesis is to develop an ontology of metadata which aims to facilitate five steps (creation, distribution, discovery, utilization, and feedback) of the open data process. In the research, we conducted the scenario analysis modeling users’ activities describing how a user finds, or uses the open data to obtain a pragmatic understanding of detailed intentions from user’s perspectives. From the scenario analysis, the lists of particular activities are identified in order to conclude requirements for the development of the scenario-based metadata ontology. Next, the requirements were applied to generate necessary metadata as entities. The seven-step ontology construction methodology was adopted as a detailed guidance for constructing our proposed ontology. Finally, the developed metadata ontology is evaluated using a questionnaire to assess competence of the proposed ontology from four aspects: perspicuity, accuracy, completeness, functionality and usefulness. The scientific contributions of the research illustrate the potential of ontology technologies in modeling metadata for facilitating activities in the open data process. The metadata elements in the ontology not only describe characteristics of open datasets but also express potential usage functionalities linking to the related open datasets. Thus,it can be regarded as a semantic base supports the semantic understanding of metadata in the context of the open data process. furthermore, we introduce scenario-based design techniques for manually creation of metadata elements. It is a feature of this research that we focus on usage scenarios from user perspectives. It can be used to discover more requirements for creating more metadata or to modify the our work in order to adapt to changing situations. We recommend other researchers not only in this field but also other fields in computer science to adopt scenario-based technique for defining goals and requirements for their design. Finally, the scenario-based metadata ontology can be served as a reference ontology used for designing open data e-infrastructures. Especially, it is recommended that this metadata ontology could be implemented on the ENGAGE platform as an alternative metadata model. The practical contribution of this research primarily gives practical implications for information architects who are responsible for designing open data e-infrastructures. The results of the scenario analysis give insights into what the users’ requirements and what actions they would take on the open data portals or platforms. Furthermore, the scenario-based metadata ontology improves open data use by providing convenient and easy semantic browsing of open data resourses based on formalised metadata. It enbales users to easily identify and distinguish similar open data resources by scanning metadata, and clearly know possible operations on open datasets. Moreover, the suitability of CERIF data model for representing open data resources has been demonstrated by mapping the entities of the proposed ontology to the CERIF logical entities. Subject metadataopen dataopen data processontology To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:970406e0-62b9-45b2-82f3-128450cddf41 Embargo date 2014-07-18 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights (c) 2014 Liang, W. Files PDF Scenario-based_Metadata_D ... _Liang.pdf 1.8 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:970406e0-62b9-45b2-82f3-128450cddf41/datastream/OBJ/view