http://www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet/special_issues/metadata/ Dear Colleagues, This special issue of the journal Future Internet seeks papers reporting high quality theoretical or practical work on Metadata and Markup. As data about data, metadata describes information about documents, events, locations or people but also addresses qualitative aspects, language, and include information about context or conditions of use. It may be used for naming, describing, cataloguing, and indication ownership of a resource. Metadata helps to facilitate the understanding and the management of data objects. While the metadata describes characteristics about the data, the markup identifies the specific type of data content and acts as a container for that document instance. Mark-up languages allow for the inclusion of many types of metadata ranging from simple dates or keywords up to highly-granular information such as Dublin Core or e-GMS. We are looking for high-quality, original papers on any aspect of Metadata and Markup including topics such as standards for supporting knowledge markup, e.g., RDFa, microformats, GRDDL, multimedia annotation (e.g., by using MPEG-7), collaborative, shared tagging and annotation, semantic annotation in Semantic Wikis, semantic authoring and publishing, document engineering, deriving semantics from document structure and content, ontology-based authoring and markup, knowledge markup in the Semantic Web, using semantic annotations to define knowledge, integrated software architecture based on semantic annotation, annotation of software components, linguistic aspects of semantic annotations, text mining for creating knowledge markup, mining semantic information from blogs, forums or news sources, collaborative, shared tagging and annotation, evaluation of annotation frameworks, deriving formal semantics from (flat or hierarchical) tagging systems, vocabularies and ontologies for semantic authoring and annotation, tools for supporting knowledge markup, semantic annotation, sematic authoring, etc. Andreas Dengel, Ph. D. Guest Editor Submission Information All papers should be submitted to futureinternet@mdpi.com. To be published continuously until the deadline and papers will be listed together at the special issue website. Submitted papers should not have been published nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is a new international, peer-reviewed, quarterly open access journal published by MDPI. Open Access publication is free of charge in the first few issues to be published in 2009. http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/2/3/238/ Semantic technologies are of paramount importance to the future Internet. The reuse and integration of semantically described resources, such as data or services, necessitates the bringing of ontologies into mutual agreement. Ontology alignment deals with the discovery of correspondences between concepts and relations from different ontologies. Alignment provides the key ingredient to semantic interoperability. This paper gives an overview on the state of the art in the field of visually supported semi-automatic alignment techniques and presents recent trends and developments. Particular attention is given to user interfaces and visualization techniques supporting involvement of humans in the alignment process. We derive and summarize requirements for visual semi-automatic alignment systems, provide an overview of existing approaches, and discuss the possibilities for further improvements and future research. http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/2/3/238/ Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 CEST Future Internet 2010-08-04 2 3 Review 238 258 1999-5903 Ontology Alignment—A Survey with Focus on Visually Supported Semi-Automatic Techniques 2010-08-04 doi: 10.3390/fi2030238 Michael Granitzer Vedran Sabol Kow Weng Onn Dickson Lukose Klaus Tochtermann http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/2/2/156/ Both the IRIS-DNS System and the PORTAL-DOORS System share a common architectural style for pervasive metadata networks that operate as distributed metadata management systems with hierarchical authorities for entity registering and attribute publishing. Hierarchical control of metadata redistribution throughout the registry-directory networks constitutes an essential characteristic of this architectural style called Hierarchically Distributed Mobile Metadata (HDMM) with its focus on moving the metadata for who what where as fast as possible from servers in response to requests from clients. The novel concept of multilevel metadata about metadata has also been defined for the PORTAL-DOORS System with the use of entity, record, infoset, representation and message metadata. Other new features implemented include the use of aliases, priorities and metaresources. http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/2/2/156/ Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 CEST Future Internet 2010-06-01 2 2 Article 156 189 1999-5903 A Distributed Infrastructure for Metadata about Metadata: The HDMM Architectural Style and PORTAL-DOORS System 2010-06-01 doi: 10.3390/fi2020156 Taswell http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/2/1/74/ Today’s engineering companies are facing unprecedented competition in a global market place. There is now a knowledge intensive shift towards whole product lifecycle support, and collaborative environments. It has become particularly important to capture information, knowledge and experiences about previous design and following stages during their product lifecycle, so as to retrieve and reuse such information in new and follow-on designs activities. Recently, with the rapid development and adoption of digital technologies, annotation and markup are becoming important tools for information communication, retrieval and management. Such techniques are being increasingly applied to an array of applications and different digital items, such as text documents, 2D images and 3D models. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of recent research in markup for engineering design, including a number of core markup languages and main markup strategies. Their applications and future utilization in engineering design, including multi-viewpoint of product models, capture of information and rationale across the whole product lifecycle, integration of engineering design processes, and engineering document management, are comprehensively discussed. http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/2/1/74/ Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 CET Future Internet 2010-03-11 2 1 Review 74 95 1999-5903 Markup in Engineering Design: A Discourse 2010-03-11 doi: 10.3390/fi2010074 Lian Ding Shaofeng Liu http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/2/1/1/ Searching names of persons, families, and organizations is often difficult in online databases because different persons or organizations frequently share the same name and because a single person’s or organization’s name may appear in different forms in various online documents. Databases and search engines can use metadata as a tool to solve the problem of name ambiguity and name variation in online databases. This article describes the challenges names pose in information retrieval and some emerging name metadata databases that can help ameliorate the problems. Effective name disambiguation and collocation increase search precision and recall and can improve assessment of scholarly work. http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/2/1/1/ Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 CET Future Internet 2010-01-05 2 1 Article 1 15 1999-5903 Metadata for Name Disambiguation and Collocation 2010-01-05 doi: 10.3390/fi2010001 Jeffrey Beall http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/1/1/28/ Metadata have long been recognised as crucial to geospatial asset management and discovery, and yet undertaking their creation remains an unenviable task often to be avoided. This paper proposes a practical approach designed to address such concerns, decomposing various data creation, management, update and documentation process steps that are subsequently leveraged to contribute towards metadata record completion. Using a customised utility embedded within a common GIS application, metadata elements are computationally derived from an imposed feature metadata standard, dataset geometry, an integrated storage protocol and pre-prepared content, and instantiated within a common geospatial discovery convention. Yielding 27 out of a 32 total metadata elements (or 15 out of 17 mandatory elements) the approach demonstrably lessens the burden of metadata authorship. It also encourages improved geospatial asset management whilst outlining core requisites for developing a more open metadata strategy not bound to any particular application domain. http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/1/1/28/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 CET Future Internet 2009-11-10 1 1 Article 28 46 1999-5903 A Method for Automating Geospatial Dataset Metadata 2009-11-10 doi: 10.3390/fi1010028 James K. Batcheller Bruce M. Gittings Robert I. Dunfey