Re: Simplicity of Concept

> > It seems to me that there is this belief that meta data can't be
> > displayed. Metadata gets displayed all the time in all sorts of
> > contexts.  An abstract is printed, but it's still metadata.  Titles
> > are also meta data and they're also printed.
>
>The problem is actually that there is no strict definition what
>constitutes meta data and what is "real" data. You could construe about
>everthing to be meta data, and you could construe about everything to be
>real data. The border depends solely on the viewpoint; and this
>viewpoint can be set arbitrarily.

While I agree that this is traditionally a hard line to see, I do believe a 
concrete line is there. More importantly I can write rules to determine what 
is metadata and what isn't. What's amazing is that most data is metadata 
because we're using it to describe objects that exist in the real world. 
Name, eye color, hair color, height, weight, sex.. these are all metadata 
about a person. E-mail address and phone numbers are two. What's intriguing 
that a huge amount of time is spent collecting and going through metadata.

>Drawing the border between visible content and invisible supplemental
>data is perfectly valid, and makes sense for various practical reasons.

I disagree because traditionally certain types of content have visible 
metadata and other types do not. So under this logic I've now got to create 
elements for both visible and invisible metadata. Also now when I search for 
the title of objects, I have to specify many elements and specify contexts 
for those elements. Just to get title information I have to look at <title>, 
<caption>, <h> and <dc:title> and that's just for HTML. And I still have to 
specify context. I should either a) be able to specify an element/attribute 
(just title) or specify a semantic role.

Orion Adrian

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Received on Friday, 9 April 2004 12:08:47 UTC