“There is no ‘spoon’ aka ‘metadata’”
“Do not try to bend the spoon — that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spoon.”
One of the conversations (which I though I had escaped), that I now continue to be drawn back into is the ‘conversation about metadata’. The cultural realisation I have recently had, is that the UK has stopped having this ‘metadata conversation’ because of the #linkeddata movement being so strong in #London – the conversation in the UK has moved into a ‘linkeddata-pattern-conversation“.
Please note: I’m not advocating one conversation over the other (just noticing the ‘type-of-conversation’ taking place in each hemisphere when like minded projects who get paid to think about this stuff get together and talk over beers or the like).
I think what made the UK’s conversation move on from the ‘metadata application profile’ conversation (created because of the JISCs Repository publication projects) was JISC’s ‘Data Expose’ #jiscEXPO and JISC’s ‘Managing Research Data’ #jiscMRD programmes. These two relatively-small investments shifted the conversation in a very fundamental way: over a period of about a year the conversation moved away from the arguments about ‘the one metadata profile to rule them’ – and instead moved on to the ‘which linkeddata patterns should we use and agree upon as a community‘ (though again, I’m not saying ‘linkeddata’ is the solution, just that it has shifted the conversation in a fundamental way).
The lightbulb moment for me in this little cultural observation was two fold: first, from my re-reading the seminal 2011 post on the ‘Seven Pillars of Metacrap’ by Corey Doctorow and second by reading a post by Rob Styles where my lightbulb clicked on the moment I read this sentence:
“That is to say, wether you consider something meta or not depends totally on your context and the problem you’re trying to solve. Often several people in the room will consider this differently.”
I think I’ve heard the above sentence (or a version of it) said over a dozen times in different conversation in the UK and yet I don’t think I have heard it once here yet?
To summarise: Is it time the conversation moved on? Or, perhaps the UK was wrong to leave this conversation? Is there a happy middle ground conversation we are missing between the two worlds? Answers on a postcard (in the comments) please 
“There is no ‘spoon’ aka ‘metadata’”
Dave, I can confirm that I’ve definitely heard the “metadata is data depending on your point of view” discussion around here, on many occasions – usually (always?) in the humanities. Metadata about newspaper clippings (eg, AFI research archives) is data for some researchers. Similarly, the eSRC (Melbourne Uni) treats metadata about people and organisations as data.
Thanks Steve, Very good point, as I am hardly an Aussie metadata expert. Would be good to get more involved in Humanities stuff again, as I have been ‘scientific instruments’ obsessed of recent. /dff
Yeah. Although I was also thinking, it applies to something like MyTardis. Instrument parameters are normally considered “metadata”, beside the “data” which is the instrument readings. But in a data transfer between two sites, both metadata and data really become “data” – now the only “metadata” is information about the transfer, last update/synchronisation dates etc.
(And more generally, when looking at the implementation details of how metadata is stored, it rapidly loses its “meta-” properties. So the concept of metadata is only meaningful for a given situation and perspective.)
Completely agree Steve, program code, data and metadata are all data, whether they are acting in a metadata role or some other role at any given moment depends entirely on context.
I think people who have mostly worked in library and archive settings tend to have an absolute rather than relative view of metadata because they focus on a particular part of the landscape where that is true.
Generally they think of a digital record of metadata, or even a paper index card, as an ‘information surrogate’ for something real like a book or artifact (that’s what I learned in library school). But I think its time to accept a more technically-based perspective, computers are probably here to stay