Hi There, Am 20.09.2009 um 23:52 schrieb Bowerbird@aol.com:
and we see yet another excellent example of how the "metadata" b.s. is such an unproductive path. Not true. It is how the metedata is use or structured. See Below.
the o.c.d. people love to focus on these minute details, which make very little difference at all -- who cares how "van holst" is sorted?, or if the "van" is capitalized or not?, or indeed whether it is "capitalised" or not?, because a search for "holst" is gonna find it no matter what you do -- and, as if this insignificance wasn't bad enough, such compulsiveness usually causes full paralysis.
Here BB is right on the point. Basically, the metadata is a dataabase. so we have the field for the name and then one or several fields of indexing that field. Furthermore in a typical library cataloge you wil find "Walter van Holst" under "Walter van Holst", "van Hols, Walter" and "Holst, van, Walter". So where doe sit leave us? With the development of a structured databese. Which means that we will have to comprise, that is cover the basic cases and in certain cases hand edit the fields involved. These special cases will be harder to find, but there will be a set of rules which will help us look for them. To make things easier we could use cross- references as in library catalogues. There is no magic bullet. As aexample take look at iTunes. It has field for sorting Artist. they use a db and for my own CDs the information is gotten from a diferent DB. I have my own notion how things should be sorted. So I edit the "sort for Artist" field. The only problem here is that for classical music sorting/ indexing by Artist is not viable. I prefer to use the Komposer field. So I have to use a different index. So what should be done is say our index follow these rules for names. If you cannot find a name where you expect it to be search do a full text search of the field X and you should find what you are looking for if not use the full name field !!! regards Keith.