Designing a Common Namespace for Searching Metadata-Enabled Knowledge Repositories: An International Perspective

With the proliferation of digitized resources accessible internationally via Internet and Intranet knowledge bases and a pressing need to develop more sophisticated tools for the identification and retrieval of electronic resources, both general purpose and domain-specific metadata schemes have assumed a particular prominence. This has resulted in a growing number of online repositories that must be accessed using terminology that would be considered unfamiliar to most searchers. Assuming that a natural language “gateway” requiring no prior knowledge of specific metadata tagging could facilitate cross-repository searching, end-users were engagedin focus group testing of a “namespace” of common categories derived from nine metadata schemes. Findings and their implications within an international context are presented. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: ©2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]