Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Metadata Coherence, Interchange, Aggregation

Caveat Lector: Aggregating Metadata.  Dorothea looks at metadata, RDF, tagging, and descriptive systems from the context of use and experience in librarianship.

This is a powerful perspective, especially with regard to the intense reliance on tacit knowledge and craft work in classification, cataloging, and indexing that arises in the application of information sciences.  I say this is a big deal, especially around the illusions that we harbor about the Semantic Web and the other use of artifacts to capture so-called knowledge. My pet claim in this context is to challenge anyone, using the MARC specification alone, to successfully create and interchange bibliographic information.  If that is too daunting, find the Dublin Core specification and notice how much you have to make up in order to create the content of an element with, say, tag <dc:creator> in XML.

In Aggregating Metadata, Dorothea looks at how noisy the process becomes once we actually want to interchange and share metadata material.  With aggregation and repurposing of the material, all manner of little slip-ups become breakdowns.  Dorothea raises an issue that I puzzle over too: Is it actually a good thing for processors of metadata coded in digital interchange to be forgiving?

I am undertaking some work (under the nfoWare category) where I intend to be rigorous about what is accepted or not.  Dorothea's perspective and experience is something that I want to refer to and keep in mind as I look at the digital forensics application of information-processing tools as well.

See also:

WinFS and Where the Metadata Comes From
When Semantic Coders Go Bad
The Insistent Messiness of Humans
Encoded Archival Descriptions
Valid != Right

posted by orcmid at 5/28/2004 05:59:16 AM