Organization Monkey

i’m working on an article about assigning metadata and happened upon the old corey doctorow comment, “metacrap.” i bump into this work every once in a while when googling something metadata-ish. it’s a humorous piece in which doctorow points out some obvious flaws in assigning metadata, such as “people are lazy,” and don’t provide quality metadata, and “people are stupid,” noting that even when people have good reasons to assign accurate terminology, they don’t. i’ve chuckled over this and moved on, but today something about it stuck out to me:

Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something. Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors you ascribe to ideas. Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to describe their material denudes the cognitive landscape, enforces homogeneity in ideas.

And that’s just not right.

i agree with his argument that people may disagree on how to describe something, but we’ve got schemas now that accommodate varying opinions (hello, repeatable fields!). i think metadata creators are making great strides in promoting heterogeneity. there are some very flexible schemas out there (dublin core, i’m looking at you) that provide a simple backbone to which a variety of elements and vocabularies may be attached.