Monday, May 12, 2003

ContextMedia and Metadata

" ContextMedia's InterChange is one of the more promising CI tools that Tony discusses. It "builds and maintains a major central metadata store... Capturing all that metadata—-and normalizing it around the Dublin Core or some other universal schema—-is the first critical task of any ContextMedia implementation."

Yow. That's nice and all, but it sounds pretty damned ambitious. In fact, all enterprise-wide metadata initiatives sound pretty damned ambitious. Strange for me: I'm a librarian by background, but I'm increasingly finding myself advising that such initiatives be delayed or avoided altogether. They're just too difficult and expensive for most enterprises to take on. Two main reasons: metadata interoperability and metadata merging."

He correctly highlights these two issues but interoperability can be solved with ontologies and ontology maintenance and metadata merging can be done through the use of mapping metaontologies. Either way there can be heavy costs involved, that's for sure.

Got Enterprise Metadata?

Standards supported by ContextMedia include RDF, etc.:
""We've assembled the only open standards-based integration platform in the content management sector, supporting key technologies such as XML, RDF, XSL, LDAP, and ODBC/JDBC, giving customers the most flexible option available to manage and share their digital content assets.""

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