Generating and managing metadata for Web-based information systems

As metadata become of increasing importance to the Web, we will need to start managing such metadata. We argue that there is a strong need for metadata management. We introduce the Spectacle Workbench for verifying semi-structured information and show how it can be used to validate, aggregate and visualize the metadata of an existing information system. We conclude that the possibility to verify and aggregate metadata is an added value with respect to contents-based access to information and that it is possible to generate it on the basis of Web contents. ?? 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.