Bowerbird@aol.com writes:
which just goes to show how pointless "metadata" is. :+)
dublin core. yeah, right...
Okay, perhaps I was a tad harsh. But at the same time you are missing the two points I was trying to make. a) It's not trivial to create a taxonomy because there are so many different ways that people organize things. b) Metadata is simply breaking down information that describes something into well defined key/value pairs which have some commonality When the Internet came along a lot of people (including Yahoo) thought, ah, this ain't so tough, we don't need no stink'n librarians. By and large, those systems suck. Librarians think in long time frames, so often they are a bit behind what is happening on the edge. But that doesn't mean that the centuries of knowledge and experience they have accumulated it worthless. For stuff that has been created in the last five minutes or even fifteen months, tags are a fantastic means of categorizing content. But for anything that has survived longer than that and should be preserved, a solid cataloging regime should be used, supervised by folks who know what they are doing. Even for material that has already been formally cataloged, adding tags will still be a useful means of providing immediate context which a formal catalog can't provide. But I'm sorry. A Zen ML approach to cataloging? That dog don't hunt. b/ -- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Banqwao, Thailand