page118
96
cory doctorow
1. Introduction
Metadata is “data about data” — information like keywords, page
length, title, word count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so
on.
Explicit,
human-generated
metadata
has
enjoyed
recent
trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario
goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on
a metadata standard — a Document Type Definition or scheme
— for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to
a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size,
capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They
create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are
available in whole or in part to search agents and other databases,
so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing
machine he’s seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for
an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet
his criteria.
If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good
metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services,
and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the In-
ternet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could
find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer
could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose
a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia.
It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris, and
hysterically inflated market opportunities.
2. The problems
There are at least seven insurmountable obstacles between the
world as we know it and meta-utopia. I’ll enumerate them below:
Content 2nd gal final.indd 96
7/4/08 9:56:58 AM