Metadata

Phil describes Prabhakar Raghavan’s keynote about Web N.0 in some detail (at WWW2007), including the following framework for thinking about user-contributed metadata. User-generated metadata is growing. Anchortext and tags are growing at the rate of 100 Mb/day. Pageviews are around 50-100 Gb/day. Reviews and ratings are small. All of these, are important, but only anchors are central to how people work on the Web. START metadata: * Star: I like this * Tag: creating tags on pictures, etc. * Access: you view a page (in a way I can see) * Routing: forwarding things to friends * Text: write a review, blog article, etc. ...

At the OCW Consortium meetings at the Open Education conference in September, I asked whether other OCWs had explicitly CC licensed their metadata. In talking to people then and since then, the general response is best characterized as hemming and hawing. Very folks appear to have considered this licensing status of their metadata. But this seems like a very clear issue to my very simple mind. I mean, what’s the point of creating open access materials if you’re going to hoard your metadata and make it hard for people to find the materials? (This same problem is what seems to have stymied the NSDL for a few years in the early 2000s.) ...

I was recently asked what I thought of Cory Doctorow’s classic Metacrap paper. He was, of course, dead on when he wrote it. The nagging question at the time was “what alternatives do we have?” And the sad answer was “not many.” ...