Interesting article in the latest issue of Information Research on whether metadata works on the Web. Terrence A. Brooks argues that the old assumptions about information retrieval don’t map to the Web:

Web resources are characterized as evolving, not static, resources. They are more like loose-leaf binder services than time-invariant database records:

Further, Brooks argues, if common metadata schema were used, they would be exploited by spammers and other scum-based life forms, which is why Google won’t tell us exactly how PageRank is determined.

He concludes that pages on the open Web are “poor hosts for topical metadata.”

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