A few years ago I wrote about some metadata that was 4,000 years old. Today I wanted to write about another high point in the history of metadata — well, some sort of point: the failure of Amazon’s folksonomy and the Playing with Fire album by Kevin Federline, the former Mr. Britney Spears. Throughout this discussion I’ll show some of the tags that Amazon users added to this album, and I’ll also provide a link to a page where you can see the top 100 entries. (As you’ll…

I had heard that Go (also known as “golang”) was an increasingly popular newish programming language before I migrated my blog from being generated by handmade XSLT scripts on snee.com to using the Hugo platform to generate it on bobdc.com. Hugo is written in Go, which was invented at Google (get it?) by three people, two of whom had contributed to the development of C, Unix, and important related technology at Bell Labs. Go provides an excellent basis for a website generation…

In an October 14th article in the New Yorker about the use of Artificial Intelligence to generate prose, John Seabrook wrote: “A recent exhibition on the written word at the British Library dates the emergence of cuneiform writing to the fourth millennium B.C.E., in Mesopotamia”. That got me thinking about some notes I once took on the early history of metadata, and I wondered if there was any scholarship to show that the earliest metadata is as old as the earliest writing. Not…

I’ve been reading up on America’s post-war attempt to keep up the accelerated pace of R&D that began during World War II. This effort led to an infrastructure that made accomplishments such as the moon landing and the Internet possible; it also led to some very dry literature, and I’m mostly interested in what new metadata-related techniques were developed to track and share the products of the research as they led to development.

I recently wrote a white paper for Innodata Isogen titled Content Metadata Standards: Libraries, Publishers, and More that is available for free if you don’t mind registering first. (If you do register, you’ll find a nice choice of other white papers available on topics such as DITA, content re-use, and ebooks.)

Last week I discussed the possibility of using the SWOOP ontology editor and the W3C’s SKOS standard to create taxonomies or thesaurii, and I promised to go into a little more detail about how to do so.

In the online course in taxonomy development that I took recently we reviewed several popular taxonomy development tools. I found them to be expensive or to have clunky, dated interfaces, and was disappointed that the formats most of these programs supported for storing saved work was either a binary proprietary format or what they just called “XML”. (I’m open to correction on any of these points.) “OK,” I wondered, “What XML?” Reviewing some samples of…