Subject: some comments on metadata meetings

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 1994 15:56:35 -0600 (CST)

Fellow metadata freaks,

I am very gratified at the constructive discussion which has 
emerged on the reflector during the last few weeks. There is 
indeed a lot of thinking going on in metadata-related areas, and 
also quite a bit of insight. All this makes me very optimistic 
as to possibilities for the collaboration which the DC meeting 
should bring - and no, I don't feel I or Dale or Otis or any of 
us have in some way been "removed" from the metadata intitiative.
We certainly cannot claim to own it in any way - not yet anyway!
We should simply regard ourselves as an informal bunch of people 
with some common problems and perceptions, trying to get some 
action started, and to some degree succeeding!
 
I agree with the comments that Dale and C$ have been making as to 
the agenda. I hope we can get the likes of Bruce Gritton and Cheng 
Hsu to present (and I assume they are listening on this reflector).
I have also indicated my willingness to present some of the insights
which have resulted from our Austin meetings so far. 
 
I have also submitted a paper for the meeting of the IEEE MSS&TCC 
meeting in Annency in June, at which I propose to relate the state 
of our deliberations on the subject, as well as some examples and 
applications of the concept of metadata, and a brief description of 
our MetaStore prototype. 
 
One of the issues which is still unresolved is that of whether there 
is actually any distiction between data and metadata. Some say 
there is not, and certainly there are applications which will use 
descriptive attributes as "data", (=> metadata is data!)
I believe however, that there will be applications which do 
make an absolute distinction (e.g. an application may use descriptive 
attributes to browse/select information to be processed, and then
may access the described information from entirely different 
sources and media in order to perform very different operations),
so that perhaps METADATA MAY BE REGARDED AS DATA, BUT DATA IS NOT 
IN GENERAL METADATA. But then again, in general, one should not 
generalize(!) 

- Jim Almond