I've just spent a few hours reading around about the use and misuse of metadata. I started with a an interesting article on XFML (a lightweight distributed categorisation DTD) XML.com: Introduction to XFML [Jan. 22, 2003] (via a mailing list digest I'm on, I know, I should switch to consuming it as an RSS feed but I haven't got there with everything yet). Anways, this led to a criticism of metadata (Metacrap) which reconfirmed my belief that automated reaping of implicit knowledge always beats manual metadata editing (excepting small subdomains where one has a budget to mark up things properly, such as library catalogues, MARC records, the OCLC and all that jazz). Undaunted I browsed on via multifarious links and ended up in the land of TopicMaps/XTM, the W3C Web Ontologies Working Group . Finally, I ended up reading about Dan Connolly's Semanitic Web Travel Tools. It is good to know that we live in a world where people are still working to create open flexible mechanisms to share and exchange structured information in useful ways. It is also interesting that people are using Perl and Python to create filters to exchange between mobile devices and fixed ones in meaningful ways. This mini-browse has reinvigorated me to keep abreast of the lastest in metadata and the semantic web.
Tweet Posted by mofoghlu at January 25, 2003 2:54 PM | TrackBack