IST-Data Services Blog

U. of Illinois is getting a chunk of NDIPP money to develop their BECHAMEL framework that identifies semantic vulnerabilities in metadata, as a means of supporting digital preservation services. What does this mean? Here’s a good quote:

“For example, the meta-data for a digital file—a photo or map or document—might include a field called “creator.” Putting a name like “John Smith” in this field might seem sufficient, but does that really identify the creator of the information? In 50 years will a future researcher be able to pinpoint which of the world’s many “John Smiths” created the information?

BECHAMEL flags risks like that one, or such as numerical values that aren’t accompanied by error ranges.”

There’s only a little more info in the article, but there are some papers on a research page at the uiuc site. David Dubin’s recent paper provides some better details. He describes their earlier BECHAMEL work as “a research environment for proposing and testing theories of the meaning of markup.” It is a Prolog app connected to an RDF store (Kowari, losing favor to Mulgara).

It sounds like some of what they’re doing is to recognize that lots of so-called structured markup (including, im my opinion, lots of RDF) is actually semantic-free and amounts to free text annotations with some weak hints (e.g., “dc:creator”). The question is whether the project will yield useful tools or more guidelines that are unrealistic in deployment. Their near term goal seems to be the conversion of entity references in free text (e.g., in  a dc:creator element) to RDF references to vocabularies. Is a reference to the concept of “San Francisco, CA” in a gazetteer more useful than the same free text? Probably. But will an RDF pointer to a FOAF description of “John Smith”be much more useful than the free text? I doubt it.  Nevertheless, a project worth watching.

Since Michael is too modest to blow his own horn, I’ll note this nice article based upon interviews with him and others in our very own IST staff news.