[Sigia-l] metadata redux

[Eric Scheid]

An article at webmonkey, exploring the use of metadata on the web.

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/03/24/index0a.html?tw=e-business

It opens with the quick retelling of the tale of the 'keywords' and
'description' meta tags, and the fact they failed once people started gaming
them ... but it would be a mistake to therefore think that all human imposed
metadata, in general, would always suffer the same fate.

The article talks about GeoURL, FOAF, DC, and more. An interesting read, not
just on the technical points of the specific technologies, but in the
sparking of the thought that human imposed meta data can actually be useful,
and remain so, so long as it's not a system which is open for exploitative
gaming. It's that aspect of the 'keywords' and 'description' tags that
primed their doom, not the fact they were "metadata".

The article only scratches the surface in terms of meta data. They don't
mention BlogChalking, or RSS autodiscovery, or AGLS, or dozens of other
technologies currently in play.

e.