A slip of the fingers can make you type “meatdata” instead of “metadata,” and a Google search for meatdata brings up almost 2,000 hits. My favorite is the 2002 job posting for a “Meatdata librarian” position at the University of Tennessee. Apparently, the relationship between “Meatdata and Active Object-Model Pattern Mining Workshop” was a hot topic at OOPSLA in 1998, 1999, and 2000 (note the /html/head/title title at the top of the browser window for each, not the h1 title). At ektron.com, chrisk wants to know if one can “setup a Parent - Child relationship between meatdata searchable properties.”

On a less sarcastic note, Rohit Khare used the term on purpose as far back as 1999 to reference the data that the metadata is about. Perhaps for my standard rant that despite our dutiful definitions of metadata as “data about data,” there’s too much metadata out there that lacks any corresponding instance data, I can start using the eighties catch phrase “Where’s the beef?”

1 Comments

By Eve M. on August 14, 2006 10:25 PM

Yeah, I frequently mistype it as “meatdata” all the time, and it always reminds me of They’re Made of Meat. I suspect “meat” is one of those inherently funny words…