[Sigia-l] RE: Taxonomy/Classification IA and Enterprise IA [warning: Ramble Follows, Will Robinson]

[Andrew H Otwell]

On 3/19/03 11:01 AM, "sigia-l-request at asis.org" <sigia-l-request at asis.org>
wrote:

> Despite my attempts to introduce SIGIA-L knowledge and discussions, despite my
> bibliographic mails espousing Wodtke and Reiss and Rosenfeld and Moorville and
> Krebs and Kahn and Norman and Nielsen and Garrett and so on, and despite my
> attempts to brign my experiences to them through the back door, the door
> remains closed. Metadata activities center around identifying which servers a
> piece of content resides on, who has access, and so on. Comments about
> taxonomy devolve into discussion about org charts. Mentions about controlled
> vocabularies receive dull-eyed and empty-faced stares (nod to the Boss).

I'm sure this is typical--it certainly rings true for me. I recently
proposed to a client that he begin more careful capturing of user-related
metadata.

The simplest example I could give him was: "you said that eventually you
want to be able to offer content that's appropriate for different audience
segments. Why don't we start tagging the content now, not only with an
Audience metadata field, but some other user-related fields?" His eyes
glazed over and he waved it off as "airy academic stuff" that had nothing to
do with building HTML pages.

If you have close access to programmers, they might understand better. You
can state things in terms they understand: "I'd like to be able to do
queries like SELECT * FROM Content WHERE Audience='students', could we add
some additional metadata fields to the Content database?" If it's presented
as a *technical* requirement, perhaps they'll be more receptive.

ao