Peter Morville’s book – Ambient Findability, is as much a philosophical muse as a book about the current state of play in the world of search and the future technologies. What he does say however is that the power of metadata is something that we can not underplay the importance of.
I recently have compiled a Metadata schema for the company I work for. Based on the Dublin Core set of rules for metadata and also the IPTC set for news (and PRISM and MIME for file formats) it endeavors to produce a set of metadata standards that can be used for text, images and video or audio file types. Obviously these days tagging your files is an involved process, how do you go about tagging an image for example, Google have made a game of it here
Tags and folksonomies will always be fraught without a metadata approach that has been thought through and applied systematically. It also underpins a good information architecture. Categorization will be successful when metadata has been carefully considered.
Once implemented finding will become an easy task. Content that has taken time and money to create can now be found, enjoyed and re-purposed. Saving money, increasing productivity and giving the user an enjoyable experience.
Now surely everybody can see the business value in investing in metadata and information architecture??
Tags: Information Architecture, Metadata
