C371 Chemical Informatics I

Search Engines and Metadata

Updated: 10 October 2003

First Generation: WWW Worm and WebCrawler
Second Generation: Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, OpenText
Third Generation: iLOR.com, Google images
Integration with commercial search services: Northern Light, Elsevier Science's Scirus and Chemical Abstracts Service's eScience
Search Engine Watch

Metadata tags describe and summarize page content and origin: Who wrote it? What's it about? etc.

Examples: <META NAME="author" CONTENT="Gary Wiggins">
<META NAME="title" CONTENT="Search Engines and Metadata">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="search engines, metadata, web searching">
The Dublin Core: 15 data elements for:
- Content (Title, subject, description, source, language, relation to another source, coverage (spatial or temporal characteristics of intellectual content)
- Intellectual Property (Creator, publisher, contributor, rights
- Instantiation (Date, type (home page, novel, etc.), format (data, software), identifier)
DCdot: Dublin Core Metadat Editor
MetaChem - a catalogue of chemistry resources that utilizes the Dublin Core.
Henry Rzepa's proposed chemical metadata scheme
Open Archives Initiative
Open Archives Metadata Havesting Protocol
Resource Description Framework (RDF) - an emerging W3C standard to support metadata across many Web-based activities.