

Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (2001) - GuiA
http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

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irickt
Conclusion, strongly in favor of practical metadata:

"... Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of
salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is often a good
means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through
the Internet.

"Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google
exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the
number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each
linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who
believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make
extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page
is.

"This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff that
human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts
through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary
collisions.

"Taken more broadly, this kind of metadata can be thought of as a pedigree:
who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely correlated have this
person's value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of
implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an
information-retrieval panacea than all the world's schema combined."

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dllthomas
I think "2.5 Schemas aren't neutral" is a valid point, but I don't understand
the proposed (conflicting) hierarchies at the bottom. Why are we trying to
place these things within a taxonomic tree? That doesn't seem to be an
accurate depiction of any real attempts to build a DTD.

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jasoncrawford
Some good points in here; even better is this from Clay Shirky:
[http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html](http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html)

