Re: xlxp-dev: RDF and XLink

    [Paul Prescod writes]:

    If it was RDF you were getting at in your question about "metadata"
then I
   want to say that RDF seems to use its own definition of metadata
which as
   far as I know is unique to RDF. Furthermore, the definition is not
   explicit in the RDF specification. The definition seems to be

        "machine-understandable information associated with a document
in order to
         make the data managable."

My experience is similar.

I'm working with a large producer of intellectual property, where
locators can be anything from a note on the back of a file folder, to a
bar code printout, to a mainframe database record, to an Oracle record.
Their internal term for "metadata" was "bibdata" -- bibliographic data.
I finally figured out that in practice, bibdata meant "whatever we've
been able to get into a computer" -- since they had naturally
prioritized managing their data (even the data that remained on paper)
with computers.

However, in the context of managing electronic intellectual property,
virtually any data or markup has potential for helping to manage the
corpus. So, "bibdata" turned out to be one of those shrink-wrap-like
words -- capable of wrapping anything.

So with "metadata". Presumably, the word speaks to those who've had to
cope with managing this manageable data. Good for marketing, I guess.

Sam Hunting

Received on Tuesday, 13 April 1999 20:05:37 UTC