Sounds like David Weinberger was at an interesting meet the other day. People from IBM and Autonomy were explaining the view from the provider side. IBM’s WebFountain is still structuring that sea of data for us (or for Factiva at least). I still think they need to bring in some web gardeners to make those fountains look pretty, but it’s a good reminder of the brute power of silicon.
More contentious, I thought, was this:
Ian Black of Autonomy says that the Autonomy project head at Ford’s training department says “Metadata is for the birds” because his department generates 5 million new objects per month, too much for manual tagging. Autonomy wants to provide systems that push info to users without requiring them to interact with it beforehand.
Gulp.
First off, as another David and then Jack note, metadata isn’t just hand-crafted tagging. It’s all the stuff that can be scraped from behaviours (who clicks where, who saves what), inferred from keywords, etc … that last bit’s a little scary. “Autonomy wants to provide …” – what? No interaction? ! Does “I do” or “I don’t want this” count as interaction?
What I really don’t – well there are many things, but I’ll keep on topic … – anyway, what I really don’t get is how you can ever automate the delivery, push that info to those users in any completely satisfactory way if you refuse their personal involvement.
For sure tagging by handicraft is the most costly way of adding metadata – I’d go with Mazzocchi’s arguments [Microsoft Powerpoint – 108Kb] on that – but it’s the most costly because it’s the richest. And it’s the richest, I think, because we’ve made it. We’ve made it not just as people, but as members of groups, teams, clans and families, and as individuals in our own right. And we’ll make it selfishly, greedily and stupidly because that’s the sort of thing we tend to excel at. [A quick thanks you to Library staff like Rochelle for trying to mediate it for us, neutrally if not objectively]
Put another way, I change, my mood changes, and although I live in this one (currently rather snot-ridden) body, there are many facets to my character, not all of which will even be clear to me. But whichever me, whichever mood, and however many handkerchiefs I hold, if you don’t interact, if you don’t ask, if you, in short, broadbrush or pigeon-hole me, I won’t care.
Not unless you’ve got a hot honey lemon tea.