A Plea for Schemas

[Paul Prescod]

It seems to me that you describe the crux of the metadata problem: even
technical people cannot be bothered to supply metadata to their standard
business documents. I don't see how new or better schema languages or
schemas will improve this situation. RDF's complexity is a problem, but
not THE problem. THE problem is that even when the metadata "framework"
is as easy as:

<meta name="author" value="Paul Prescod">

people will probably not use it unless they are forced to.

I suspect that the way forward is through the implementation of document
management within organizations. Once a critical mass of internal data
is properly labelled, that data can be made available on the Web using
standardized metadata vocabularies. Corporations have levers for
encouraging conformance that standardizers do not.

 Paul Prescod

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