Elegant, frictionless tools for metadata management

The authors present a case study of how the Press Association (PA) implemented elegant, frictionless tools to enable the creation, enrichment and management of semantic metadata. The project evolved from the very successful work done by the PA to supply semantically-enriched content to the official Olympics website.

Commercial off-the-shelf products for managing metadata were investigated, but for a number of reasons including cost and difficulties of integration, we decided to build and rapidly prototype a custom solution in-house. We will show how this approach enabled greater business buy-in for semantics, through providing a visually attractive, usable interface for non-specialist data curators, combined with powerful widgets to ingest data from diverse sources.

The technical architecture will be discussed in an accessible way, including how the use of APIs enabled third party linked data on the web to be ingested, refined and then exported to a triple store and a text analytics application for concept extraction. We will highlight both what went well and what didn't, as well as covering some of the particular metadata challenges that a major news organization faces, such as quality assurance, disambiguation, governance and maintenance.