Aggregating Metadata from Heterogeneous Pop Culture Resources on the Web

Abstract

Japanese pop culture resources, such as manga, anime, and video games, have recently experienced an increase in both their consumption, and appreciation for their cultural significance. Traditionally seen as solely recreational resources, the level of bibliographic description by cultural heritage institutions has not kept up with the needs of users. In seeking to remedy this, we propose the aggregation of institutional data, and rich hobbyist data sourced from the web. Focusing on manga, a form of Japanese comic, this paper discusses classification and aggregation, with the goal of improving bibliographic description through the use of fan created data. Bibliographic metadata for manga was collected from the Japanese Agency for CulturalAffairs media arts database, along with several Englishlanguage manga fan websites.The datawas organized into classesto enable property matching across data providers, and then tested with existing ontologies and aggregation models,namely Europeana and the Open Archives Initiative’s Object Reuse and Exchange, to determine their suitability in working with these unique resources. The results show that existing ontologies may be suitable for use with pop culture materials, but that new vocabulary terms may need to be created if there is an abundance of granular data that existing ontologies fail to properly describe. In addition, the OAI-OREn aggregation method proved to be more promising than EDM when examining the aggregation of related pop culture resources. The paper discusses these issues, as well as recommendations for addressing them moving forward.