Metadata: Shaping Knowledge from Antiquity to the Semantic Web

by Richard Gartner

This book offers a comprehensive guide to the world of metadata, from its origins in the ancient cities of the Middle East, to the Semantic Web of today. The author takes us on a journey through the centuries-old history of metadata up to the modern world of crowdsourcing and Google, showing how metadata works and what it is made of. The author explores how it has been used ideologically and how it can never be objective. He argues how central it is to human cultures and the way they develop. Shaping Knowledge from Antiquity to the Semantic Web is for all readers with an interest in how we humans organize our knowledge and why this is important. It is suitable for those new to the subject as well as those know its basics. It also makes an excellent introduction for students of information science and librarianship.  

Genres: Nonfiction

122 pages, Paperback

Published August 22, 2016

Reviews

[Ayesha ( ˙▿˙ ) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by one of my module leaders for my Information and Library Studies MSc.

I'm a first-year student and although I work part-time in a public library, I'm quite new to the academic side of library studies. So as a relative novice, I found this book mostly easy to understand. There were a few sections that I struggled with and chapter 5 completely lost me. However, I did appreciate the smooth writing style and the plentiful examples that accompanied each topic. There's also splashes of witty humour that I found quite funny.

The content of this book is pretty interesting. I like that it covered a wide range of areas ranging from the ancient history of metadata to how it's adapted to current digital technologies. I would recommend this book to any fellow students like me, or anyone who has an interest in metadata, how information is organised and library/information science.

[Emily Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

The third book on metadata I’ve read since library school and the least painful of them all. An easy read, but practical and technical enough to be useful. Also, the first of the bunch to avoid being overly esoteric when explaining linked data and the semantic web. I mean, y’all could have just said it was URIs and triples.

[Stephanie Wilcox · Rating 3 out of 5]

I might've enjoyed this more if it wasn't past midnight and I wasn't frantically reading this for school. Rip

[Imanol Basurto · Rating 4 out of 5]

No es algo que acostumbre leer, en ese sentido, tuve fricciones con ciertas operaciones conceptuales que propone el autor (un uso literal y por momentos deliberadamente no reflexivo de ciertos términos y genealogías de los metadatos en su condición histórica) pero que justamente son dispuestas de esa forma debido a que los intereses del autor son otros. Aún así, es una lectura importante en términos orientativos y descriptivos, otorga una vision general de la manera en que articulamos el conocimiento y lo volvemos inteligible y accesible.

[Bequi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es un texto escrito de forma muy sencilla (lo cuál es súper útil si no eres ingeniero en informática), pero muy completo. Gartner obviamente es fan de los procesos y dificultades a los que se enfrentan la gente de archivos.

[Bookwormthings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting but the diagrams are too small.

[Leonidas Papachristopoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

An easy read book, appropriate for those who work in GLAM sector. It would be the ideal textbook for librarianship students or digital humanists.