Quality in metadata: a schema for e‐commerce

An issue of increased interest in metadata research concerns finding ways to store, in the metadata of an information resource, data regarding the resource's quality. The purpose of this paper is to present a metadata schema that facilitates representation and storage of data related to the quality of an e‐commerce resource, the e‐commerce evaluation metadata (ECEM) schema.

A study of quality approaches that can be applied for the evaluation of e‐commerce resources is provided. The ECEM schema structure and elements are described. To demonstrate how ECEM can be used, two indicative examples are given: describing an e‐commerce quality approach, and storing quality evaluation results. A discussion about the validation and implementation of ECEM is also provided.

It has been demonstrated that ECEM can be effectively used to describe e‐commerce quality approaches. ECEM also facilitates the structured representation and storage of quality evaluation results. It is recommended that ECEM metadata be encoded using the eXtensible markup language (XML); thus, a corresponding XML schema has been produced.

Metadata about resources' quality has been developed ad hoc, according to the needs of each particular application domain, and cannot be applied in other contexts. E‐commerce is one application domain where no such contributions currently exist. ECEM is a step towards the reusable and interoperable storage of quality information in metadata. It is expected to facilitate a large number of potential applications, such as quality‐oriented search of e‐commerce resources and reusable storage of evaluation results.