MetadataMoratorium - Raymond Yee's Wiki

Limitations of Metadata

http://iu.berkeley.edu/rdhyee/2005/02/04#a1342

Just read Is It Time for a Moratorium on Metadata? by Dick Bulterman. Fun read and good description of the current limitations of metadata schemes, especially for non-textual objects. There's a lot more to say than what I can do here. And a lot more to ponder, especially since I've been in the business of creating tools (like the ScholarsBox) that manipulate metadata.

I like his "personal back-to-basics definition of metadata": "Optional structured descriptions that are publicly available to explicitly assist in locating objects".
"Now, 10 years later, I’m not sure we’ve learned much that's new about using metadata to locate generalized media except that metadata in the context of electronic processing is probably not nearly as useful as it was in conventional library catalogues."
"For nontext data—such as video, images, audio, and so on—direct mining is difficult, but exactly at the point that metadata might be useful, manual creation simply doesn’t get done because creating useful metadata descriptions (the proverbial thousands of words) is not in the critical path of content creation."
The author does a good job at listing problems with automatic metadata generation systems. I can testify that it's hard to get good automatic metadata after working hard to get it from my own Treo600Phone.
"it is totally unrealistic to expect that the devices’ users will spend any time thinking up descriptive filenames or adding extensive captions: They’re too busy taking new pictures!"

I know that MarcDavis is hard at work to change this situation -- and I'm curious to know the state of the art with respect to metadata generation with video and images.

See DigiLib: University of Groningen: Moratorium on metadata, another analysis of Bulterman's article.