Subject: Documentation

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 1994 19:45:11 EST

Let me add an echo to what John Kineman and James Brunt have said.

Most of my work has been at the interface between the scientific
community and the information management community.  You can't
explain easily what (the awful, horrible, pretentious) term "meta-data"
means to the former, and the latter has a hard time incorporating
all of the aspects of "documentation" of a data set into a traditional
data base driven concept of meta-data.  We have opted in our
projects supporting large scientific field experiments to go with
the "data publication" analogy.  It gains automatic recognition
from the scientific community, and it provides a paradigm for what
constitutes required descriptive information about the data ("meta-data,
if you insist).  It also provides a good implementation mechanism,
in that you need to write a human-readable "technical paper" about
the data, which will accompany it whereever it goes.  The challenge
to information managers is how to capture this meta data in electronic
form, store and index it in standard ways, and associate it with
individual data "items" in such a way that an appropriately descriptive
document can be automatically constructued to accompany the data
returned by an arbitrary query.

Donald E. Strebel
Code 923
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD  20771