Collection: A user defined group of data sets.
Comment: High level information associated with a file or data set left by users.
Content Based Retrieval:
Content Management System (CMS):
Data Extraction: A transformation that creates new data from the given data. An example would be the execution of analysis code on an image file's contents to determine if a face is in the iamge. Clowder utilizes extractions to automatically generate metadata, signatures, and previews from a file's contents and provide users with means of finding, relating, and utilizing data that may be difficult otherwise.
Data Set: A group of files that through some defined relationship or corresponding metadata are strongly tied together and not representable otherwise by the individual files.
Extractor: A tool which takes a file, section of a file, data set, or collection as input and through some analysis of the contents produces some higher level information, e.g. metadata, or other derived product, e.g. preview, to aid users in searching/organizing data (both automatically and/or manually).
File: The lowest level unit of information that can be tracked. This is a file from a file system.
Metadata: Simply data about data (e.g. tags or keywords).
Preview: Derived data from a file or data set which is easier for a user to view, perhaps over the web where bandwidth is a consideration.
Section: A subset of a files contents (e.g. a sub-image, a line from a document, a frame from a video, etc...). A sections is tied to a file.
Space: A group of collections, data sets, and files with defined user access rights.
Tag: A short string, e.g. one or two words, associated with a file or data set used to categorize or index its contents.
Technical Metadata: Automatically generated tags, signatures, or previews produced from extractors.
User Metadata: Tags or comments associated with file or data set, entered by a human user.
Versus: A framework for decomposing content based comparisons into reusable parts that can be mixed and matched to meet a variety of user needs when content based indexing and retrieval is a viable means of allowing users to search a collection of data.
Versus Metadata: Signatures, typically numerical in nature, generated by versus to represent some semantic aspect of a files contents. Used for content based retreival.