Metadata på webben
en studie av metadata och dess användning på sex svenska högskolors och universitets webbplatser
The purpose of this Master's thesis is to study metadata and its use at Web sites of six Swedish universities and colleges. Each Web site has been examined at three different hierarchical levels and the total number of examined Web pages is 258. 16 questionnaires have also been sent to webmasters at the six universities and colleges. The results show that metadata refers to the data which can assist to organize, describe, identify, locate, evaluate and retrieve resources on the Internet. Even though there are several different metadata formats available on the Internet, the commercial search engines only support the HTML's title tag and the meta tags with the attributes keywords and description. The six examined Web sites use the meta tag to some extent. The metadata format Dublin Core is represented in a small number of the examined Web pages. Search engines usually present the title tag and the description tag of Web pages in the search results. Therefore, it seems especially important to provide good title and description tags. The study of the three different hierarchical levels at each Web site shows a difference in the use of metadata. At some levels the HTML's meta tag is not used at all. In the questionnaires, the webmasters describe the Web sites as decentralized, where each webmaster only answers for his/her part of the Web site. The differences in the use of metadata could be due to each webmaster's interest and knowledge of metadata.