Simon,
I'll admit that I may not have grasped what SD is suggesting but I find
myself going: yes there is a problem, but no that's not the solution.
As I understand SD, he is arguing that there should be a single
authoritative source for given key elements (in his illustration:
author) as a way to manage metadata quality and improve services. He
suggests that the author should maintain their 'entry' for a given
element and other services should point to that. I can't tell it his
intent is that this allows only the author to uniquely identify
themselves or if it allows a another party to identify the author also.
The author can then maintain an up-to-date profile of themselves, so
that references to them remain constant.
This suggestion seems to be analogous to the developments in online
address books, where you sign up to a service and enter your address
details and add friends. Anytime someone updates their personal details
the details are then updated in all the address books which use them (I
assume some of them are based on .foaf as well).
I agree that there are problems in uniquely identifying authors and
maintaining current date details, and this could be one approach to
addressing it.
I have to disagree however, with the proposed solution in it's
application to learning objects and other related digital objects.
Aside from the commitment, e-literacy, and technical competency involved
in every author creating and maintaining a .foaf file, and a consistent
website address, the problem with this approach seems to be that the
service referring to the my.foaf relies entirely on the accuracy of the
metadata created by the (external) author.
For example, if the author misspells the name of his institution (or
uses a different variant of it) there is little the service can do about
it. Consequently the service's reliability and consistency suffers.
Service's may also not be able to depend on the completeness of any
given foaf - some authors may include email addresses, some not.
I think that managing consistency within a distributed service ideally
requires some level of a centralised name authority file (within a given
service or a given community). Even if this is only on the level of
being able to standardise the name format (John Brown vs. Brown, John),
the service needs a degree of control to normalise its metadata.
does this count as a rational objection? :)
cheers,
John
Simon Grant wrote:
> At 16:01 2005-07-11, Robert John Robertson wrote:
>
>> At the risk of provoking a Friday afternoon discussion at the start of
>> the week, has anyone else read the OLDaily section on metadata?
>>
>> "Metadata
>> This was intended to be a note to myself, partially to comment on
>> discussion list metadata and partially to frame some throughts for my
>> talk in Colorado in August. But it makes some points that bear wider
>> consideration, and in particular, two principles of metadata: metadata
>> for a given entity should never be stored in more than one place; and
>> metadata for a given entity should not contain metadata for a second
>> entity. By Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, July 7, 2005 "
>>
>> http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2005/07/metadata.html
>
>
> I hadn't read it. Thanks for pointing it out.
>
> On reading it, I am struck with extensive agreement. I'd be curious, at
> least, to hear of any arguments rationally refuting SD's position. If no
> one can refute it, sounds like it would be high time to take it on board.
>
> Simon
>
> --
> Simon Grant http://www.simongrant.org/home.html
> Information Systems Strategist http://www.inst.co.uk/
> Please continue to use my established e-mail address
> a (just by itself) (at) simongrant.org
--
R. John Robertson
Centre for Digital Library Research
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Strathclyde, Livingstone Tower
26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, G1 1XH, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 141 548 5854
Website: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/
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