Abstract
As evidenced through rapidly growing digital repositories and web resources, automatic metadata generation is becoming ever more critical, especially considering the costly and complex operation of manual metadata creation. Also, automatic metadata generation is apt to consistent metadata application. In this sense, metadata quality and interoperability can be enhanced by utilizing a mechanism for automatic metadata generation. In this article, a mechanism of automatic metadata extraction called ExMETA is introduced in order to alleviate issues dealing with inconsistent metadata application and semantic interoperability across ever-growing digital collections. Conceptual graph, one of formal languages that represent the meanings of natural language sentences, is utilized for ExMETA as a mediation mechanism that enhances the metadata quality by disambiguating semantic ambiguities caused by isolation of a metadata element and its corresponding definition from the relevant context. Hence, automatic metadata generation by using ExMETA can be a good way of enhancing metadata quality and semantic interoperability.