In a recent posting, I mentioned that I’ve been thinking lately about how some people doing metadata work (in particular, people doing RDF Schema and RDF/OWL ontologies) don’t care much about whether there is any corresponding data to go with their metadata. We all dutifully define metadata as “data about data,” but a lot of metadata out there is not really about any existing, useful data. Dan Connolly called it “ontologies for the sake of ontologies.”

While discussing RDF/A, Shelley Powers recently wrote:

After following Dave Beckett’s pointer to Stefano Mazzocchi essay On the Quality of Metadata last week, I remembered that while we have people like Stefano and Bruce D’Arcus among us with stronger backgrounds in more classical approaches to metadata, most geeks think that technology from ten years ago is ancient history. I’d like to recommend two books I’ve read recently for the historical background they provide on the creation, organization, and use of metadata to…

I haven’t looked too hard at dojo, an open source Javascript toolkit, but on robotwisdom I found out about the Data Model Comparison Table on dojo’s website. The page’s multiple tables compare various dojo data model and metadata concepts with comparable concepts in RDF, XML, SQL, spreadsheets, CSV files, Google Base, Ning, and more. If you don’t care about dojo and take its columns out of the table, the comparison of the remaining columns is still very interesting.…

More bloggers are embedding Technorati Tags into their postings, and it’s great to see a major league app use user-created metadata for anything. The popular convention of announcing what your Technorati tags are as part of your blog’s content, though, made me wonder: can we add these tags where the casual reader doesn’t see them, so that they really are metadata instead of being additional tagged content? For example, if I write a posting about RDF and XMP without actually…

A few months ago, Danny Ayers said that he was looking for work. Now, he writes