Theme Creation for Digital Collections

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