Our understanding of the world is facilitated by our ability to associate things, to compare and contrast, to categorize, and to form abstract relationships. To shape information in ways that allow others to better understand, we deliberately describe the information around us to shape it, creating new forms of knowledge. When communicating with computers, we can do this using metadata.

Metadata is simply a piece of information that describes other information. For example, let’s look at some text, a headline from nytimes.com:

Bush Continues to Push Congress for Resolution on Iraq

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 12:30 PM ET

President Bush today kept up pressure on Congress to approve action against Iraq amid new criticism from Democrats.

• Video: Bush Speaks on Iraq Issues
• C.I.A. and F.B.I. Defend Counterterrorism

The data in this case is the headline and summary:

Bush Continues to Push Congress for Resolution on Iraq

President Bush today kept up pressure on Congress to approve action against Iraq amid new criticism from Democrats.

The metadata is the surrounding information that helps us understand the context or to categorize the data:

Published by: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Publish time: 12:30 PM ET

Related information:

• Video: Bush Speaks on Iraq Issues
• C.I.A. and F.B.I. Defend Counterterrorism

There may also be other metadata that isn’t displayed but which helps the system display or organize the data:

Desk: National

Information Type: News

Format: Column

To allow readers to search or browse their news, the New York Times might collect one taxonomy of terms – a form of metadata – and display all these terms together. For example, the Desk taxonomy looks like this:

International

National

Politics

Business

Technology

Science

Health

Sports

New York Region

Education

Weather

Obituaries

This collection is called a metadata schema, meaning a systematic combination of elements.

Metadata can describe other things as well, such as people or places.

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There are several types of schemes that can be used when organizing metadata:

[ insert chart ]

adapted from “Levels of Control” from and “An Ontology Spectrum” from Deborah McGuiness

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Essentially, the benefits of these metadata schema are:

• improved browsing and searching by making it easy for the users of a system to find information
• improved communication among people by creating a common vocabulary
• simpler maintenance by reducing chaotic use of language

Here’s some basic definitions to help tell the different kinds of schema apart:

• Synonym Ring: A grouping of similar words or phrases. Synonyms might be used in a search engine by locating relevant information when someone searches on a related term.
  
  

• Glossary: a collection of terms and definitions within a particular domain. A glossary could be used to simply help people agree and understand a common terminology.
  
  

• Taxonomy: An arrangement and naming of metadata, usually hierarchical. A taxonomy might be a list of category names.
  
  

• Faceted Taxonomy: A taxonomy with attributes and attribute values. If News is a term than an attribute could be Country and an attribute value of Country could be France.
  
  

• Thesaurus: A taxonomy that also includes terms that are associated and terms that are related. The term Newspaper is associated with the term Journal and related to the term Town Crier.



The above are often referred to as “controlled vocabularies”. If we try to go beyond formal vocabularies and formalize our knowledge of a subject this is known as “knowledge representation”.



• Ontology: the specification of one’s conceptualization of a knowledge domain. Ontologies resemble faceted taxonomies but use richer semantic relationships among terms and attributes, as well as strict rules about how to specify terms and relationships.

It might help to define some related terms:

Controlled Vocabularies – a defined set of preferred terms. Types of controlled vocabularies include Synonym Rings,

Authority Files, Taxonomies, Faceted Taxonomies, and Thesauri. Ontologies are not usually considered a form of controlled vocabulary but rather a form of knowledge representation.

Attribute – an aspect of an object, such as the publisher name. Attributes are alternately called “facets” when applied to taxonomies, “slots” when applied to ontologies, or “fields” when applied to databases.

Attribute Value – a value assigned to an attribute. For example the attribute “Publisher Name” can have a value of “New York Times”.

{show examples of all these}

A note on metatags: metadata and metatags are related, but are different things. Metatags are found within markup code (like HTML pages) to identify certain attributes of that information. Metadata goes *into* metatags, but metadata has many other uses as well.

An attack on postmodern literature by Jonathan Franzen, which equates difficulty with high art. I see an analogy to design.

The original article is offline in the New Yorker, an interview is online.

‘…I think it’s kind of a natural idea. As a student, you’re handed Milton or Shakespeare, you’re told that it’s great literature, and you find it difficult to read – at least, at first. Or you’re in gym class, trying to pole vault, and the bar keeps getting raised, and you learn that the more difficult the jump the better it is. If you think of a novel as a contract between the reader and the writer, an agreement to entertain and be entertained, difficulty doesn’t make much sense…’

Notes from a talk by Bob Lord:

Ultimately, you are helping people.

Hopefully, this results in something for you too.

Research the situation ahead of time.

Look for opportunities to “reconnect” – to get back to them with something that will help them.

Respond with ATM – Answer Transition Message. Answer positively, transition away from negative ideas, state your message.

A nice list…

http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm

HerIM: …the second thing is your IA findings focus on the intranet,

which is a good suggestion…but what do you think about the Internet?

MeIM: oh, that

MeIM: that Internet thing

MeIM: i’ll do more there

HerIM: that would be cool. you can use 2 pages if you need to

MeIM: but that would hurt Mr. Tree

HerIM: what is mr tree?

MeIM: Mrs. Tree’s husband

MeIM: shattering their family

HerIM: i’m going to ignore you now

MeIM: fatherless kids

HerIM: when can you send me your updates?

MeIM: oh, the horror

MeIM: in 5 minutes

HerIM: word

As much as we write, filter, embellish, design, decorate, and publish, we rarely capture our rich human personalities on the web. The best writers I know come close, but it’s a life’s work pushing their craft to that level. And yet I’ve found simple correspondence can often push it to the next level, revealing so much more of us. Perhaps the difference is the tone we take when speaking to a friend instead of an anonymous audience, perhaps we let our guard down. Perhaps it’s the personalized message possible when we know the other’s interests. Whichever, the people I have met – both in person and through email – come across in technicolor compared to their published selves.

Such is the case with T.R., whose site was finally outed through her work with A List Apart. I’m lucky enough to claim her as a friend and neighbor. Her blog is certainly worth a read, but as usual only hints at the person within.

Do you have a neighbor on the web? The person within might be only an email away!

How will we create and access information in 10 years? In 20 years?

How do you wish we would?

Progress is so constant we rarely pause to acknowledge it. We have split the atom, put astronauts on the moon, and replaced unhealthy hearts in the living with healthy hearts from the dead. Computer technology leaves a record of faster, smaller, easier to use technology: We’ve come from mainframe computers the size of large rooms to microprocessors embedded in credit cards. From assembly language to Java. From command line interfaces to mouse-and-keyboard driven multimedia interfaces. From computers dialing each other at 1200 bits per second to constant communication at millions of bits per second.

We have so much potential.

With so much progress, it strikes me as odd that we devote so little time to planning for it. We have an understanding of what we need to do now when designing products (“make it usable”, “make it beautiful”, “increase brand equity”…). How helpful it would be to hold similar common understandings of what we should all have 10 years from now. This could then guide all our efforts towards our goals, rather than design products as a series of guesses about what should be next year.

How will we create and access information in 10 years? How do you wish we would?