Hmmm... I think Steve's point has been missed somewhat...
Why do we always need new additions of DDC and UDC and Library of
Congress Subject Headings?
Great as these schemes are for categorising information to a high degree
of specificity and precision, that information is contingent and subject
to entropy.
There is a huge overhead in maintaining the precision and specificity to
keep pace with the changing infoscape (is that a word?)
Is any metadata no matter how imprecise a good thing, or is metacrap
worse than no metadata at all? I think maybe both arguments are true,
depending on the purpose of the metadata. There is no reason why you
cannot do tight and slack classification using both a precise and a
fuzzy taxonomy. If one fails the user, maybe the other will make up the
shortfall in description.
Having a slack and imprecise scheme whose maintenance is highly
distributed goes against the whole ethos of the DDC/UDC/LCSH approach
but provides 'good enough' metadata to find pictures people have taken
last year in your chosen holiday destination for this one (plus a few
quirky false hits).
Throw in a bit of Bayesian mojo and figure out the probabilities of
meaning and you jack up the precision a whole order of magnitude. Then
you can map back into your more rigid taxonomies and the usefulness of
both is improved imeasurably.
I don't know about anyone else but I became an information professional
solely to meet girls. It hasn't happened yet, but the time will come and
soon where my PG Dip in Information and Library Studies will mean I am
inundated with attractive young women desperate for me to help them out
of the terrible homonym pickle they've gotten into with their photo
album categorisation. Thank you Flickr!
Flickr and deli.cio.us have brought the day much closer when the
knowledge of how to effectively organise information becomes publicly
recognised as cool and sexy and librarians will be worshiped as gods...
Better dust down your best cardies.. :)
P.S. TLOTR IS about jewellery. See the Four Word Film Reviews site:
http://www.fwfr.com/
'Migets attempt jewellery destruction'
Now THAT is metadata..
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