s.im.pl:
meta-metadata guide
s.im.pl serialization oodss meta-metadata
meta-metadata prereqs principles development
environment in-context expander tutorials
reference API repository community programming practices
interface ecology lab research

Meta-Metadata is a language for defining metadata structures, wrappers, operations, and presentation. It is designed to enable librarians, curators, and power users to add new information sources to collection representation applications. Our methodology is different from, yet inter-operable with, more mainstream semantic web approaches in that the language is designed first to facilitate metadata structure, extraction, manipulation, and presentation, rather than for predicate logic, like RDF. Meta-metadata enables mash-ups of heterogeneous information sources through well-defined metadata semantics.

Meta-metadata enables authoring application independent, reusable template wrapper descriptions that enable the extraction and processing of metadata from any information source that publishes XML or HTML in a consistent form. The architecture, implemented as an open source compiler and library, is designed to facilitate utilizing these meta-metadata descriptions in diverse collection representation applications, including information visualization and personal information management tools, web crawlers, automatic metadata extraction systems, search engines, and digital library repositories.

Brush up on prerequisites and principles as needed. Set up a development environment. Perform the tutorials to get your feet wet.

publications
Qu, Y., Kerne, A., Webb, A.M., Herstein, A. Interoperable Metadata Semantics with Meta-Metadata: A Use Case Integrating Search Engines. Proc ACM DocEng 2011, Mountain View, CA, USA, Sept. 20-22, 2011, 171-174 [DOI=10.1145/2034691.2034729].
Kerne, A., Qu, Y., Webb, A.M., Damaraju, S., Lupfer, N., Mathur, A. Meta-Metadata: A Metadata Semantics Language for Collection Representation Applications, Proc ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 26-30 2010.
Kerne, A., Damaraju, S., Kumar, B., and Webb, A. Meta-Metadata: A Semantic Architecture for Multimedia Metadata Definition, Extraction, and Presentation, Poster and Demo Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies, Koblenz, Germany, 3-5 December 2008.