Meta conversation on metadata
Jay “Misspells His Own Last Name” Fienberg has trenchant comments on my article about metadata.
A big part of our difference may have to do with the loose (= wrong) way I define metadata. Part of it may have to do with where we’re looking at metadata issues. E.g., Jay thinks there’s no essential difference between arguments over FOAF and over the format by which we express date data; I’m instead thinking about the argument over what categories of info we need to exchange information about our friends. The argument over how to express that info is, I agree, important but not relevant to my interest in metadata.
We also disagree at least a little about what’s driving the need for metadata. Jay thinks it’s “the desire for increasing abstraction, rather than need for metadata itself.” My point was that the drive for metadata and the particular schema we come up with, are rooted in desire itself, not in a desire for metadata or even a desire for abstraction. And while I agree that we have willingly moved further up the abstractness tree — the cowardice of irony, for example, is a sign of this — I do think the need for more metadata to manage the new volumes of information has the unintended consequence of making our experience more abstract than before.
I find his comments right on the point and very helpful. Thanks, Jay.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I just happened to be reading an article about John Dewey which seems appropriate: “From Hegel Dewey inherited the idea of thought as both the mediation of “raw” sensation through categories and concepts, and the idea that such mediation does not signal a movement away from reality, but towards a more adequate grasp of it.”
I’d rather use a shovel to dig a hole than my bare un-mediated hands. (Though once in awhile it’s good to wiggle your toes in it.)
http://www.molloy.edu/academic/philosophy/sophia/Dewey/pragmatism_txt.htm
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/PragmatIsm
FWIW I find the term ‘metadata’ often does more harm than good, in that it suggests there are crisp lines between ‘data’ and ‘metadata’. There’s just data. FOAF contributes some vocabulary for talking about people, documents, etc. in data files. Whether these are ‘meta’ or not doesn’t affect what we can use them for, processing, storage, query tools etc…
I agree that metadata isn’t the crisp term that it seems like it should be, but then what term is? While it may get in the way sometimes, I think that it’s also quite useful in many circumstances, and not just where it’s relatively strictly used wrt schema and taxonomies. It provides a helpful way to think about the ways in which we’re abstracting ourselves from experience and, more important, the ways in which our experience has abstraction built into it.
I agree too.