D'Arcy Norman pointed me to this interesting article about some of the practical issues surrounding metadata and searching. Writes Norman, "We've seen the same limitations he lists for "hand collected metadata" - metadata that's manually entered by users. If you give them too many fields (like, say, maybe IMS LOM?) they just won't do it. Or, even worse, they'll do a crappy job. Even CanCore isn't small enough to be done efficiently and effectively. Heck, even DublinCore is too big for most users to regularly enter all fields completely." I think this is exactly right. We also get a reworded account of a problem posed a few days ago asking the question of what it is, exactly, that metadata describes. Interesting take: "The Web has resources, identified by URI, and you can ask for 'representations,' which come with some metadata, but the metadata is about the representation, not the resource." But that makes no sense either - the author is the author of the resource itself, not the representation of the resource. Right?
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