[Sigia-l] Metadata, metadata, everywhere

[Dan Brown]

The latest issue of Scientific American
(http://www.sciam.com/issue.cfm?issueDate=Aug-02)
includes an article on efforts to save dying
languages. Evidently, linguists around the world are
setting up databases of languages doomed to
extinction. The problem, of course, is that no one has
established a common format for capturing information
about these languages. What caught my eye is the group
of people who "have been working to bring some order
to this chaos by building an 'open language archives
community' (OLAC) that uses metadata ... to smooth out
these inconsistencies."

Is it just me (and it wouldn't surprise me if it were)
or is the need for information architecture seeping
into other fields? Perhaps with our technical and
communications capabilities to uncover massive amounts
of data (no matter how obscure the field), the need
for accessible, findable, and manageable information
emerges.

-- Dan

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