The Unexpected Virtue of Metadata

It’s really hard to get people to understand why it’s worth investing in metadata and taxonomy projects. The benefits aren’t immediate and the reasons can seem esoteric. It’s only after the work is done that the usefulness of metadata starts to become clear.

Proof of this comes in this interview with a colleague of mine at REI. This is a quote I’m going to pull out at every metadata and taxonomy meeting from now on:

“[Collecting metadata] turned out to be really smart. We didn’t realize the repercussions of it when we did it. But the structured way we captured the meta-data and user-generated content (UGC) laid the groundwork for how we use that content.” (My emphasis.)

I had nothing to do with the decision to collect metadata in this instance, but I’ve seen firsthand the powerful unintended benefits of having robust structured content. Perhaps one way to convince others ahead of time that they should invest in proper content markup is to collect more testimonials and stories like these. If you know of any others, let me know in the comments.

A “clickable” world

Drew Olanoff suggests that Twitter could extend the hashtag idea to make “bits and pieces of data clickable.” I’m not a fan of Twitter these days, but I love the idea of incorporating data structure into online content through simple affordances. Ah, so that’s Twitter’s strategy: A “clickable” world – The Next Web:

“By structuring data, Twitter could make its network of information easier to navigate and discover upon. It would also help the company structure its API so that third-party developers wouldn’t have to dig through every single tweet for particular information. I can click or tap around Wikipedia for hours, since everything is linked by its editors. Twitter could engage users in the same way.”

A Smart Bike

This is why the future is in metadata.

Phil Windley gets us thinking about what a “smart bike” might do:

Imagine the bike being connected to its manufacturer, the bike store that sold it, and its owner. From its earliest point in being, the bike would be able to keep track of data about itself, things like its specifications, when it was made, and even the provenance of the materials used in its manufacture. The bike would keep track of inventory data like when it was delivered to the bike shop, who assembled it, its price, and when it was bought and by who.
And all this would be possible with a personal cloud for a bike.

While Phil’s vision could be accomplished without an on-board bike computer, it’s hard to imagine a truly useful fire-and-forget system without one, or without a connected infrastructure at the important points of presence: the manufacturer, the store, the bike shop, etc. But this sort of automated administration would be useful for all sorts of things, and I don’t see any technical hurdles standing in the way. It’s just a matter of building the supporting schemas and software.

(This post was originally published on The Machine That Goes Ping on 5/26/12)