Chapter 15. Designing metadata

As you’ve no doubt noticed, more information is available than ever before—on the Web, on your company intranet, in your content management repository, and elsewhere. This is exciting and a problem, as well as extremely frustrating when you can’t find what you’re looking for.

What’s missing is information about the information—that is, labeling, cataloging, and descriptive information—that enables a computer to properly process and search the content components. This information about information is known as metadata.

Although metadata has been a buzzword in information technology and data warehousing, it has recently emerged as an important concept for those developing search and retrieval strategies in reference databases or on the Web, for authors of structured content, and for developers of enterprise content management and web publishing solutions. With more complex authoring processes and information delivery requirements, you need to classify and identify all the information or content “bits” so they can be retrieved and combined in meaningful ways. Well-designed metadata can provide the classification and identification you need.