Jim Harris has a trilogy of posts on metadata that I recently stumbled across:
You Say Potato and I Say Tater Tot
A very nuanced view of metadata written from a business perspective, with business examples.
Something you can recommend to business clients to prep them for discussions about topic maps and their information systems.
The second post in the trilogy had this quote which I reproduce in its entirety:
The Metadata of Babel
Another insightful comment came from Peter Benson, based on his work with the eOTD (ECCMA Open Technical Dictionary).
“Mention the word metadata,” Benson explained, “and you have immediately lost all but the hard core techies and they have neither the authority nor the budget to solve the problem. If you take a hard look at the financial crisis or cancer research you will indeed find the reason the challenges are so difficult to solve is in large part because of the limitations in our ability to communicate effectively and the lack of transparency that comes from poor data integration. So, metadata is really important.”
“The Babel approach of a single language to unite them all,” Benson continued, “has a very poor track history and there is good reason for this. Language is more about power and authority than it is about true communication. We have tried to come up with a solution that is solely focused on achieving unambiguous communication. It really does not matter what it is called as long as we agree on what it is. We do this by using terminology to define concepts and then assigning concept identifiers that are used as metadata. The separation of the terminology from the concept identifier, or rather linking terminology through a concept identifier, allows everyone to remain comfortably in their own space yet communicate with others.”
Question: Has anyone mentioned this to the W3C Semantic Web folks?
PS: Reading Jim’s blog, OCDQ Blog: Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality is also recommended.