Theme Creation for Digital Collections

Abstract

This paper presents a solution to integrate multiple sources of semantics for the purpose of metadata creation. A new framework is proposed to define topics and themes with both manually and automatically generated terms. The automatically generated terms include both terms from a semantic analysis of the collections and terms from previous user’s queries. An interface is developed to facilitate the creation of such topics and themes as well as the use of such topics and themes to create metadata for digital resources. The framework and the interface promote human-computer collaboration in metadata creation. Several principles underlying such approach are also discussed.