Metadata as a Methodological Commons: From Aboutness Description to Cognitive Modeling

ABSTRACT Metadata is data about data, which is generated mainly for resources organization and description, facilitating finding, identifying, selecting and obtaining information①. With the advancement of technologies, the acquisition of metadata has gradually become a critical step in data modeling and function operation, which leads to the formation of its methodological commons. A series of general operations has been developed to achieve structured description, semantic encoding and machine-understandable information, including entity definition, relation description, object analysis, attribute extraction, ontology modeling, data cleaning, disambiguation, alignment, mapping, relating, enriching, importing, exporting, service implementation, registry and discovery, monitoring etc. Those operations are not only necessary elements in semantic technologies (including linked data) and knowledge graph technology, but has also developed into the common operation and primary strategy in building independent and knowledge-based information systems. In this paper, a series of metadata-related methods are collectively referred to as ‘metadata methodological commons’, which has a lot of best practices reflected in the various standard specifications of the Semantic Web. In the future construction of a multi-modal metaverse based on Web 3.0, it shall play an important role, for example, in building digital twins through adopting knowledge models, or supporting the modeling of the entire virtual world, etc. Manual-based description and coding obviously cannot adapted to the UGC (User Generated Contents) and AIGC (AI Generated Contents)-based content production in the metaverse era. The automatic processing of semantic formalization must be considered as a sure way to adapt metadata methodological commons to meet the future needs of AI era.