Contextual Metadata in Practice

This article aims to survey the scene of contextual metadata annotation of digital content. This is performed through a literature review of current research, looking closer at formal context models, contextual metadata gathering and contextual metadata formalisation respectively. The findings of these efforts indicate that the reviewed context models have three elements of context in common. However, these formal models are inconsistent with the contextual metadata gathered in approaches described in the reviewed literature, in which location metadata are the most common. Furthermore, contextual metadata gathered in these initiatives end up in a variety of data structures. One reason for the dominance of location metadata might be the clear understanding of their ontological dimension. Therefore, the author introduces the notion of ontological dimensions in the area of contextual metadata. The proposed notion of conceiving contextual metadata as a set of ontological dimensions makes it possible to divide the endeavour of formalising elements of context into manageable information chunks. Through identifying and reaching a consensus of the constituent parts of these dimensions, it is the belief of the author that we are well on our way towards improved interoperability, metadata interpretability and digital content reusability facilitated by contextual metadata.