Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Metadata and Librarians

the semantic web, metacrap and libraries "Well, I may be biased, but a lot of it probably has to do with who exactly is creating the metadata. Librarians are probably as third-party and objective as you're going to get, when it comes to analyzing resources. Doctorow's concerns of overt misrepresentation for personal gain are lessened when the party creating the metadata really only has a stake in its correct representation. Of course, librarians do make judgement calls: they're unlikely to create metadata for just any resource and do apply some rules (certain subject specificities, etc.) that may not actually provide the most useful metadata."

"I do agree that a global ontology is probably hopeless, but I do think that applying an assortment of ontologies where necessary (or possible) might go a ways towards creating data that can be globally related."

"But anyway, even if a global ontology, whether made up of related ontologies or not, can't happen, or doesn't happen, it's not like its subsets don't remain valuable."

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