A tool for adding Dublin Core metadata to Web pages

Gordana Stojsic, Igor Ljubi, FER, University of Zagreb

Using metadata in Web pages has been recognized as one of the ways to make Web search more efficient. In the area of metadata standardization, the Dublin Core metadata standard has been developed for describing a wide range of networked resources. The Croatian Academic and Research Network recommends the use of Dublin Core metadata in order to improve the searching of the Croatian Web space.

Metadata can be added to a HTML document manually, by editing the source, but this approach, aside from being tedious and time-consuming, may also introduce unintentional errors in typing, HTML syntax, etc. In order to make adding metadata easier, a tool for editing Dublin Core metadata was created. This tool allows introducing new metadata, as well as viewing and modifying existing metadata in an HTML file. Finally, the tool also automatically extracts potential keywords from the text, thus making the selection of keywords easier for the Web administrator. The keyword extracting algorithm is based on the frequency of words in the text as well as their position and formatting emphasis in the text.

This tool was tested on the content of the WWW.HR information on Croatia covering the topics history, economy, culture, tourism, nature etc.