This article describes work undertaken at the Warburg Institute in London into the definition of machine-readable ontologies for the identification of iconographic subjects. Iconography, a descriptive discipline concerned with the identification of the content or subject of an image, is a core component of the wider discipline of iconology, the study of the meanings of images in their cultural or historical contexts. The research detailed here attempts to define the core of an ontology for the indicators of an iconographic subject that would be employed by an art historian in making an identification: these are encoded in OWL, the Web Ontology Language. The article demonstrates how such an ontology may be queried in XML format using simple XQUERY queries. Future directions for this research are discussed, including its possible integration with image recognition technologies to facilitate more automated approaches to iconographic identification.

This article introduces the methodology of intermediary schemas for complex metadata environments. Metadata in instances conforming to these is not generally intended for dissemination but must usually be transformed by XSLT transformations to generate instances conforming to the referent schemas to which they mediate. The methodology is designed to enhance the interoperability of complex metadata within XML architectures. This methodology incorporates three subsidiary methods: these are project-specific schemas which represent constrained mediators to over-complex or over-flexible referents (Method 1), templates or conceptual maps from which instances may be generated (Method 2) and serialised maps of instances conforming to their referent schemas (Method 3). The three methods are detailed and their applications to current research in digital ecosystems, archival description and digital asset management and preservation are examined. A possible synthesis of the three is also proposed in order to enable the methodology to operate within a single schema, the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS).

The importance of metadata in the formation of knowledge and culture is discussed in relation to the epistemological model known as 'Ackoff's Pyramid'. The importance of libraries and librarians in the curation of culture is examined particularly in the context of their historical and current roles in the development of metadata.

This article examines the potential of employing structured texts, encoded in the Parliamentary Metadata Language XML schema, for the machine-readable analysis of substantial corpora of legislative proceedings. It demonstrates the potential of using PML corpora for combining the results of sentiment analysis with contextual metadata to establish and visualise patterns of divergent attitudes towards a topic such as immigration as they correlate with such features as party affiliation or geographic location. This is readily achieved using such simple techniques as XSLT transformations or XQUERY searches.

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. Metadata: 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.

The value of historic observational weather data for reconstructing long-term climate patterns and the detailed analysis of extreme weather events has long been recognized (Le Roy Ladurie, 1972; Lamb, 1977). In some regions however, observational data has not been kept regularly over time, or its preservation and archiving has not been considered a priority by governmental agencies. This has been a particular problem in Southeast Asia where there has been no systematic country-by-country method of keeping or preserving such data, the keeping of data only reaches back a few decades, or where instability has threatened the survival of historic records. As a result, past observational data are fragmentary, scattered, or even absent altogether. The further we go back in time, the more obvious the gaps. Observational data can be complimented however by historical documentary or proxy records of extreme events such as floods, droughts and other climatic anomalies. This review article highlights recent initiatives in sourcing, recovering, and preserving historical weather data and the potential for integrating the same with proxy (and other) records. In so doing, it focuses on regional initiatives for data research and recovery – particularly the work of the international Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth’s (ACRE) Southeast Asian regional arm (ACRE SEA) – and the latter’s role in bringing together disparate, but interrelated, projects working within this region. The overarching goal of the ACRE SEA initiative is to connect regional efforts and to build capacity within Southeast Asian institutions, agencies and National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) to improve and extend historical instrumental, documentary and proxy databases of Southeast Asian hydroclimate, in order to contribute to the generation of high-quality, high-resolution historical hydroclimatic reconstructions (reanalyses) and, to build linkages with humanities researchers working on issues in environmental and climatic history in the region. Thus, this article also highlights the inherent value of multi/cross/inter-disciplinary projects in providing better syntheses and understanding of human and environmental/climatic variability and change.

This paper attempts to analyse the convergence roles of librarian and digital asset management in the contemporary information environment. The key components of Digital Asset Management have been defined by van Niekerk, one of the key commentators on the subject, as all of those tasks needed to allow the ingest, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets. This paper will particularly look to Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science and subsequent attempts to re-write them for the digital age as the conceptual framework within which such an analysis can take place. By examining the core principles on which library science is built, it is argued that the principles of digital asset management are firmly embedded within these and that an overlap and ever-increasing convergence between the two disciplines is inevitable.

This article attempts to assess the feasibility of a Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) based XML approach to integrated metadata for a complex digital archive. In particular, it aims to test whether such an approach can emulate two key features of RDF-based metadata architectures: the flexible reusability of components and the encoding of semantic linkages. In doing so, it seeks to establish whether this approach can be a viable alternative to ontology-based models for digital archive metadata. To do this, the standard use of METS as a packaging schema is extended as an 'intermediary schema' to enable the reuse of conceptual models within its architecture; in addition, the semantic mapping of components to concept repositories is achieved using the METS structural map and the Metadata Authority Description Schema (MADS) schema for controlled vocabularies.

This work-in-progress article discusses DILIPAD (Digging into Linked Parliamentary Data), a project funded under the Digging Into Data Challenge. DILIPAD aims to create an extensive corpus of structured XML data of parliamentary proceedings from three countries (United Kingdom, Netherlands and Canada) in order to enable large-scale diachronic analyses of their content. The corpora integrate the textual data of proceedings within contextual metadata encoded in the XML schema Parliamentary Metadata Language (PML). The article discusses the background to the project, the construction of the corpora and highlights they ways in which they may be used for quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Whilst a large body of plot and field-scale research exists on the sources, behaviour and mitigation of diffuse water pollution from agriculture, putting this evidence into a practical, context at large spatial scales to inform policy remains challenging. Understanding the behaviour of pollutants (nutrients, sediment, microbes and pesticides) and the effectiveness of mitigation strategies over whole catchments and long timeframes requires new, interdisciplinary approaches to organise and undertake research. This paper provides an introduction to the demonstration test catchments (DTC) programme, which was established in 2009 to gather empirical evidence on the cost-effectiveness of combinations of diffuse pollution mitigation measures at catchment scales. DTC firstly provides a physical platform of instrumented study catchments in which approaches for the mitigation of diffuse agricultural water pollution can be experimentally tested and iteratively improved. Secondly, it has established national and local knowledge exchange networks between researchers and stakeholders through which research has been co-designed. These have provided a vehicle to disseminate emerging findings to inform policy and land management practice. The role of DTC is that of an outdoor laboratory to develop knowledge and approaches that can be applied in less well studied locations. The research platform approach developed through DTC has brought together disparate research groups from different disciplines and institutions through nationally coordinated activities. It offers a model that can be adopted to organise research on other complex, interdisciplinary problems to inform policy and operational decision-making.