Metadata




Future of Metadata

In 1990, there were about 900,000 ISBNs.Today there are 32 million ISBNs and an unknown number of unidentified books.

Visibility will become harder. As more ebooks get published, and virtual shelf space expands, it is going to become harder to find eyeballs.
Making a title discoverable in a world where hundreds of thousands of books are published each year is more critical than when only tens of thousands were being published. 

Metadata has been important in bookselling for many years, but because a book is no longer a physical object, discoverability via metadata is only just now becoming a main problem

Metadata is the first line of defense in the signal-to-noise ratio. 
Given that this ratio is only going to increase over time, there’s a huge role for metadata to play.


The current state of book metadata

CORE LAYER (ISBN, title, author, publisher, category, cover, etc.) - Hundred-year-old technologies
It's All about Catalogization 

SEMANTIC LAYER (Semantic fields tagwords, keywords, classification, entity and fact extraction) - Fifty-years-old technologies
It's All about Searchability



WHAT IS NEXT? 
Discoverability Is Publishing’s Next Big Challenge
...but there is a problem....


It is quite possible to digitize all the books in the world – proved by Google.
It is quite possible to apply all the existing semantic and linguistic techniques to these books and extract all the facts, concepts and events “scene by scene”. 
Unfortunately, the only thing we can achieve this way is to make all these books searchable.

Searchability is not Discoverability 
With traditional metadata you can find lots of books on any subject, but try to find the one you like.

Traditional semantic and linguistic techniques are helpless when it comes to the analysis of a literary work in its beauty and integrity. 
They do not understand the "spirit of a book", but we as human beings love books exactly for their spirit.

Every author has own style, attitude, mood and tone. 
When you read several books by the same author, you become accustomed to the author’s style of writing and sometimes you look for authors with a similar style.
There is an integral component in the works of every author, which either attracts people or repulses, but if you ask readers about that they would not be able to explain this fact.



There are lots of novels on entrepreneurship. 

But “The Financier” by Theodore Dreiser is unique



Theodore Dreiser is NOT a “semantic field” or the set of keywords. He was a Genius


It is rather often that a tone, mood, intonation and a lot of other hidden elements happen to be much more important than the genre or even the plot...

Current metadata which based on bibliographic or semantic information is very important for organizing digital collections, but useless for effective book discovery.

We have to detect an author's style, tone, mood and attitude analyzing a non-verbal elements of a language and we can do it.
Our goal is to bring these missing elements to metadata because it’s time to re-think book metadata, as we know it!


Introducing BOOKPASS


Hologram-like, literary ‘fingerprint’, containing lots of elements of author's text which hard to define, but vital for understanding the book essence. 
It's not enough for a modern metadata to just answer the question "what it is written about", we have to understand "how it is written”. 


Most importantly, as our database grows- the complexity of the relationships between books evolves.
We believe that it’s the best companion to traditional metadata and foundation of new generation of book metadata, discovery and marketing.