Lou Rosenfeld has posted an interesting little rant, playing off of a recent Clay Shirky rant about the Semantic Web. While I don't buy the Shirky argument, I did find Lou's comments valuable. He talks about seeing more and more people look to "metadata" as the answer to all their problems (just like portals and push in years gone by). But, Lou points out that this is complicated stuff:
Why am I so uneasy with large metadata-driven approaches? One problem: in many environments, those espousing metadata as "the answer" don't recognize that there are really two types of metadata to wrangle with: structural (think attributes or fields) and semantic (descriptive values or controlled vocabularies that populate those attributes). Each of these can require an extensive investment to think through, develop, implement, and, perhaps most importantly, maintain. People's information needs are moving targets, as is an organization's content; the metadata that connect them naturally need to evolve as well.
There are ways to approach these problems, but don't let anyone fool you into thinking that it will be easy or cheap.
Posted by Karl
December 2, 2003 08:37 AM