Metadata: The Vision

This series of posts is part of a short paper I am writing for Communication Design for the WWW.

What does having all the extra data in the form of amateur publications do for us though that it ought to be organized in the first place? Aside from the intrinsic reward of having data in a coherent order we gain the potential for software to better discover data that we need for various reasons and to assemble that data in a meaningful way.

This paper was actually researched with the use of del.icio.us's metadata search tools. While I could've used Google to do searches for the specific keywords related to metadata, what I could not do was limit those searches' results primarily to conference proceedings, papers, or serious web articles (as opposed to blog postings, forum chatter, and news clippings).

While even the early returns are promising, the real vision of metadata lies in what the Semantic Web has the ability to bring us:

The agent promptly retrieved information about Mom's prescribed treatment from the doctor's agent, looked up several lists of providers, and checked for the ones in-plan for Mom's insurance within a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating excellent or very good on trusted rating services. It then began trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete's and Lucy's busy schedules.

We are quite a bit away from the technology for medical information to be correlated automatically with personal scheduling (let alone the legal issues with such information being open and accessible by machine reasoners) however. The reality of cutting edge metadata is much less striking (and unsettling), though still fairly useful.

Next: State of the Art