Re: "metadata" as "data about data"

Hi Dan,

Thanks for this! Funny thing is that I was sitting in a meeting with KOS
people today and when I asked them to comment on our document they also
pointed out that this definition of metadata would not fit everyone. They
also said we should have a definition for data but that's a different
story...

So +1 to update the draft, and reference to this old spec for the source.

Regards,
Christophe

--
Sent with difficulties. Sorry for the brievety and typos...
Op 5 mrt. 2015 15:38 schreef "Dan Brickley" <danbri@google.com>:

> re http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD-dwbp-20150224/#metadata
>
> Congratulations on your new Working Draft. Just a brief point as I
> begin to work through the doc... I'd like to suggest that you consider
>  recycling an old sentence from the early RDF '97-9 work, which
> addresses up front the awkwardness inherent in defining "metadata" as
> "data about data":
>
> """The distinction between "data" and "metadata" is not an absolute
> one; it is a distinction created primarily by a particular
> application, and many times the same resource will be interpreted in
> both ways simultaneously."""
>
> One of RDF's strengths is that it works at both these levels. While
> the dwbp doc's scope goes beyond RDF, I think the insight in that old
> paragraph from the first RDF Recommendation remains relevant.
> Currently you write "Metadata is data about data." as well as "A
> metadata document must be published together with the data"; taken
> together this makes the distinction seem more clear-cut than it often
> seems in practice.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>
>
>
>
>
> (*) context: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/
> "The World Wide Web was originally built for human consumption, and
> although everything on it is machine-readable, this data is not
> machine-understandable. It is very hard to automate anything on the
> Web, and because of the volume of information the Web contains, it is
> not possible to manage it manually. The solution proposed here is to
> use metadata to describe the data contained on the Web. Metadata is
> "data about data" (for example, a library catalog is metadata, since
> it describes publications) or specifically in the context of this
> specification "data describing Web resources". The distinction between
> "data" and "metadata" is not an absolute one; it is a distinction
> created primarily by a particular application, and many times the same
> resource will be interpreted in both ways simultaneously."
>
>