boakes.org

I recently read an interesting article about metadata (called “MetaCrap“) which opens with what appears to be a debunking, but closes with confirmation of what I firmly believe - that metadata can be authored by humans and machines and that regardless of the author, it’s down to the end user to decide whose data and services should be trusted.

If you take they key points at face value, as they appeared on slashdot recently, it appears to be a rather negative read, however, each point illustrates neatly why metadata that is pervasively authored can work.

• People lie
  True, but not all people do, and part of the concept of the semantic web is that you can decide who’s metadata you trust, and to what degree you trust it.
• People are lazy
  True again, the article describes the laziness of people writing (for example) a document. This is good, the documents over which people have taken more time will have more potential to be discovered.
• People are stupid.
  The “Plam Pilot” example is beautiful and the semantic web presents so many possibilities for how this issue could be overcome. The RDF and OWL recommendations are only the simplest building blocks, and any one or a combination of concepts could be built on these to retrospectively correct spelling mistakes. The author suggests that “Plam Pilot” is a common error, so it’s not difficult to envisage a (trusted) resource which matches common spelling errors to their correct version - the required process of inference that enables this to be of benefit is what the semantic web is about.
• Know thyself
  Provides an excellent insight into the fact that metadata can be authored by anyone (humans) and anything (machines), so the two distinct sets of information described could happily coexist withing the Semantic Web. It further illustrates the fact that there is some beautiful maths which can be applied with semantic web data through statistical analysis in order to discover hitherto unrecognised relationships.
• Schemas aren’t neutral
  True. I described just such a mismatch (finding a plumber) in this paper at ccgrid 2004. Other schema which bridge the gap between mismatched schema will exist and over time, common standards and recommendations do emerge.
• Metrics influence results.
  The thing to remember with the semantic web is that anyone can author the metrics, so you don’t just get to decide which metrics you’re interested in, you also get to decide who you’ll believe. And you can also compare the metrics of someone you trust with someone you distrust to see just how evil they really are.
• There’s more than one way to describe something
  Again a very attractive argument because here the author hints at the underlying philosophical debate that schema limit expressiveness. However, just as language enables the communication of concepts for humans, rather than limiting it, so schema enable the communication of facts for computers.