Metadata, semantics, and ontology: providing meaning to information resources

Metadata research has emerged as a new discipline in the last years, and is focused on the provision of semantic descriptions of a diverse kind to digital resources, web resources being the most frequent target. Such associated descriptions are supposed to serve as a foundation for advanced, improved services in several application areas, including search and location, personalisation, and automated delivery of information. In consequence, metadata research focuses both on the development of metadata description languages of a general purpose or specialised kind and also on the practicalities of metadata creation, dissemination, assessment, maintenance, and use for diverse scenarios and usage contexts. Ontology has emerged recently as a knowledge representation infrastructure for the provision of shared semantics to metadata, which essentially forms the basis of the vision of the Semantic Web. The combination of metadata description techniques and ontology engineering defines a new landscape for information engineering with specific challenges and promising applications, which requires a truly multi-disciplinary approach. This paper is intended to provide some basic insights for the endeavour of engineering systems based on metadata, semantics, and ontologies, and to foster the interaction of researchers with different backgrounds coming from diverse disciplines.