Some questions

David Orchard orchard at pacificspirit.com
Thu Dec 2 04:02:28 GMT 1999


As well, I fall into the context is king category, not content.

The best metric we have for that is company market caps and revenues.  TV
Guide makes more than CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox put together.

Yahoo wins because the context is human created rather than generated.
Human context or Point of View is always more usable to humans than machine
POV.

If you argue that Point of View and Context are actually content not
metadata, then there's no such thing as metadata.  It's all just data.
Which is what I actually believe.

Cheers,
Dave Orchard


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xml-dev at ic.ac.uk [mailto:owner-xml-dev at ic.ac.uk]On Behalf Of
> Tim Bray
> Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 1999 3:47 PM
> To: Walter Underwood; 'xml-dev at ic.ac.uk'
> Subject: RE: Some questions
>
>
> At 02:02 PM 12/1/99 -0800, Walter Underwood wrote:
> >I disagree on this one. It's rare that metacontent is more
> >valuable than content, long-term. I'll bet on the books over
> >the card catalog, every time.
>
> Wow, that's a profoundly deep and strong statement, and I think at the
> core of the argument that *should* be happening about how to make the
> Web a better place.  In fairness, it should be said that Walter works for
> a company whose search engine does the equivalent of reading all the
> pages of all the books on all the shelves, and trying to guess what the
> books mean.  I used to be in that business myself.
>
> But I think metadata wins.  If you count hits on Internet search engines,
> the Yahoo and ODP directories, which are both human-constructed metadata,
> absolutely wipe out any fulltext search engine you can name, even though
> they have orders of magnitude less sites and a lower volume of information
> about each.  Because human-constructed metadata wins on the net just like
> it did in the library.
>
> RDF is important because it can facilitate the interchange of, and
> a certain number of the common uses of, this kind of metadata.
>
> Anyhow, just because you have a card catalogue doesn't mean you throw
> the library books away. -Tim
>
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