There’s been a stange and unintended intersection between A.S. Byatt’s A Biographer’s Tale, which I read over the weekend, and my work, which has led me into research on the Semantic Web . I became interested in metadata while looking for a way to standardize exchanges between the systems with which the test engineers in my office work and the data reduction/analysis tools that I and my predecessor have developed. The whole scope of what metadata is supposed to be able to do - flexible taxonomies, the death of ontology, xml, folksonomies, essentially change the way we view ideas - is a bit beyond what I need. I just want a standard that will outlive my time on the project.
The idea behind XML, the idea of a standardized data exchange language that can meet the subjective needs of users, is very intriguing, but the trend is to create data storage systems in XML as well, which seems unneccessary. Actually, I realize that the more I talk about this, the more technical I will become and the more confused most readers and myself will become, so I’ll cut this off here. As I said, I’m only just learning about a lot of this stuff, so if you’re interested, follow the links, but don’t expect me to be able to comment very intelligently on the debates that surround this phenomena.