Peter,
You are raising two separate issues:
* The intentional addition of inaccurate metadata
* Prioritising metadata to avoid misleading
They are almost the converse of each other.
I saw a good example of confusing metadata about two years ago when I
was shown a prototype of an electronic 'yellow pages' kiosk. Searching
this system for the term 'piza' bought up a list of section headings.
'Restaurants' was towards the bottom of the list. Above it were things
like 'Timber Yards'. These, upon investigation, sold wood for wood fired
piza ovens.
Piza was not a section heading; the system was relying on the term
occuring in the business name or the descriptive text (really keywords)
supplied by the business. Unfortunately the answer most people were
looking for came far down the list (and under a section heading most
people would not have expected).
An answer to this problem may be to prioritise the keywords (the
prioritisation is what I would call an annotation to the value).
However, a major problem with metadata is the cost of its production
and capturing more metadata simply adds to this cost and potentially
impeads the spread of metadata.
It is probably more efficient *at the moment* to improve the way the
response is presented to the user. In the piza example, it is likely
that the greatest number of hits were in 'Restaurants'; that catagory
should have been presented first. More difficult situations (like your
beer example) would require clever heuristics... Result summarisation is
a very interesting research area.
andrew waugh
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