Automatic RDF Metadata Generation for Resource Discovery

Automatic metadata generation may provide a solution to the problem of inconsistent, unreliable metadata describing resources on the Web. The Resource Description Framework (RDF [10]) provides a domain-neutral foundation on which extensible element sets can be defined and expressed in a standard notation. This paper describes how an automatic classifier, that classifies HTML documents according to Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC [8]), can be used to extract context sensitive metadata which is then represented using RDF. The process of automatic classification is described and an appropriate metadata element set is identified comprising those elements that can be extracted during classification. An RDF data model and an RDF schema are defined representing the element set and the classifier is configured to output the elements in RDF syntax according to the defined schema.