Visual-Meta: An approach to Surfacing Metadata

Visual-meta is an approach to make a document's metadata equally readable by human and machine (not hidden from view), by adding an appendix to the end of the document. Based on the de facto interchange standard BibTeX, the visual-meta Appendix presents all the information needed to cite the document (author, title, date, etc.) as well as clearly stating the values of any data (such as tables, lists, advanced layouts, etc.) and glossary terms. A visual-meta aware PDF software reader will then 'read' the document and find the visual-meta appendix which it will load this into memory. This will enable advanced functionality such as copying text and pasting it as a citation in one step, without interfering with legacy PDF readers. It will also reduce the need for citation managers and increase the opportunity for development of advanced citation management systems[1], [2], [3]. The work is inspired by and supports Doug Engelbart's push for an Open Hyperdocument System with xFile [4], [5], including the embedding of metadata for the use of advanced ViewSpec on reading. For further information, including links to proof-of-concept software and a demo video: liquid.info/visual-meta.html