Measuring the diversity of data and metadata in digital libraries

Abstract: Diversity indices have been traditionally used to capture the biodiversity of ecosystems by measuring the effective number of species or groups of species. In contrast to abundance, which is correlated with the amount of data available, diversity indices provide a more robust indicator on the variability of individuals. These types of indices can be employed in the context of digital libraries to identify trends in the distribution of topics, compare the lexica employed by different authors or analyze the coverage of semantic metadata