[Sigia-l] Disposable navigation systems

[Ted Han]

On 8/3/05, Listera <listera at rcn.com> wrote:
> The significance of Google is that it creates multiple layers of
> abstraction/meaning/navigation/etc on top of data that may have *no*
> metadata at all. IOW, you don't need to add anything to your data for Google
> to "discover" things about it and relate it to others, thereby creating
> potential navigation.

That's okay though.  With regard to what i'm talking about, metadata
and data can be treated the same.  The resources that a system can
draw from are simply dots of content that can be connected in certain
fashions.  Metadata has to be collected the same way data is, i.e.
from humans, and is then associated w/ some previously collected datum
(automatically generated "metadata" isn't really meta-, since it's
accessable through the data itself).  So in either case we're still
dealing w/ corpora of human generated inputs.

Google happens to knows what to look for in the data out there that
has been collected, but somebody (or something) else decided what was
important to collect.  And that fact limits what google can do.  They
take imperfect data and still turn out some pretty good results
(depending on the product & task at hand), but they're not perfect
(which is a-okay, they're still kicking the pants off everyone else).

-T
Furor Arma Ministrat