|
Dr. Dusan Soltes
One of the main positive characteristics of the current development in the world wide web (www) has been its relatively high level of standardization, harmonization and integration especially in its communication, technological, technical and software aspects not to mention a tool for the language of communication where absolutely unique and dominating position has been acquired by the English language. Thanks to these positive development trends in standardization of the technological aspects, nowadays there are no evident communication problems on the www. With this evident technological comfort in using web in a relative contradiction is the remaining and/or still prevailing situation regarding the interpretation of the content of all these world wide communications i.e. situation in data and information. Thus it is no surprise that during the latest period of the www development, more and more attention has been paid also to the questions and problems of harmonization and integration of its content. As the most relevant tool for this kind of the task, the metadata and metainformation have been considered which by their substance deal with the most important aspects of the data and information as far as their identification, documentation, classification and especially interpretation and utilization are concerned. But as in every relatively new problem area also in the area of metadata/metainformation there are numerous diffrent approaches, methods and systems of their handling including those being available on the web. Thus it is no surprise, that currently there have been in progress several international initiatives and/or projects to harmonize and integrate these various approaches to metadata/metainformation. One of them has been also the project funded by the European Commission "A Network of Excellence for Harmonising and Synthesising the Development of Statistical Metadata" and/or "METANET Project". As our analysis conducted under that project demonstrates (some results we have already presented also on the IASSIST 2001 Conference in Amsterdam) there is really a lot of work to be done in achieving a kind of harmonization and integration in the metadata/metainformation. As a result of that preliminary analysis of the existing systems of (statistical) metadata/metainformation, we have, among others, altogether identified a total of 14 different types of metadata, 12 types of their organization and/or holdings (files), 13 metadata objects just as far as the statistics is concerned, 14 metadata functions and altogether 33 various metadata/metainformation models, tools, methods, structures and/or systems, etc. In this respect our paper will present some first preliminary results achieved in the synthesis of the results of the particular analysis and will identify some possible ways and means how to achieve gradually also in the area of metadat/metainformation and through them gradually also in data and information on the web the same user comfort in their interpretation and utilization as it has been so far achieved in the above technological aspects of the www. Dr. Dusan Soltes Faculty of Management Comenius University Bratislava Slovakia |