A fine-grained metric system for the completeness of metadata

Abstract

Metadata quality is an issue that can be approached from different aspects. Among the most essential properties characterizing a quality metadata record is its sufficiency to describe a resource, which is expressed as the completeness of the record. The paper presents a fine-grained metric system for measuring metadata completeness that is capable of following the hierarchy of metadata as it is set by the metadata schema and admeasuring the effect of multiple values of multi-valued fields. Moreover, it introduces the aspect of the representation level of semantically equivalent information that should be taken into account when measuring completeness. The proposed metric system, based on the definition of completeness of a field, treats several deficiencies of the traditional coarse metrics and offers the ability of targeted measures of completeness throughout the metadata hierarchy. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.