On 25 Jun 2008, at 13:53, Peter Cliff wrote:
> I'm not convinced the content of a document is enough to accurately
> (and sustainably) describe what it is about.
I think that you are taking a remarkably bold epistemological position
there.
> This email, for instance.
That sentence too.
I suppose that one should argue that a speech act can only be
understood in the context in which it was uttered, and that micro-
context needs to be placed inside a larger social and political
context. But I am only an engineer and not licensed for such musings.
What I can say with confidence is that Google already uses the context
of closely linked documents to help its indexing (not reading between
the lines, but reading between the links).
> That said, I'm not disagreeing that update of repository deposition
> has been slow - but I'm not sure we can blame that on just the need
> for metadata!
Still it's true that repository metadata schema design tends to go
through two phases:
(a) what are all the things that we want to gather
(b) what can we realistically expect people to enter
--
Les
|