Great Post/Article on Metadata (really!)

http://www.computer.org/multimedia/mu2004/promo1.pdf

Raymond Yee helpfully points out this great article by Dick Bulterman titled “Is it Time for a Metadata Moratorium” from which Raymond extracts this true nugget:

“For nontext data – such as video, images, audio, and so on – direct mining is difficult, but exactly at the point that metadata might be useful, manual creation simply doesn’t get done because creating useful metadata descriptions (the proverbial thousands of words) is not in the critical path of content creation.”

Seems obvious, right? And yet, hyperbolic testimonials to the wonders of flickr and del.icio.us aside, this seems exactly the problem (one of many) that countless repository initiatives seem destined to replicate in positing a repository ‘container’ that isn’t even loosely coupled with either the content creation or content use/re-use environments or workflows. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa. – SWL