There are many terms that people can’t agree on. The great thing about standards is that even when everyone doesn’t agree about definitions included in those standards, these definitions provide a common baseline for everyone to work from.

In a recent posting here on The future of RDFa, I described some of the advantages of RDFa compared with some of the disadvantages of microformats. When Massachusetts Commonwealth Mass.gov Chief Technology Strategist Sarah Bourne posted a comment about problems that microformats present for website accessibility, I asked her to elaborate, and she was kind enough to put this together for me.

How do we assign metadata to data? Ontologies often say “here is some information about the metadata we’d like to have for our data”, but the actual assignment of metadata that conforms to an ontology is usually more work than developing the ontology. Who assigns this metadata, and why do they do it? You have three choices: people who do it because they’re paid to, people who do it because they want to, and automated processes. I’m reading up on doing it with…

A view source on a lot of web pages out there shows something like this, which is from a web page created by the DITA Open Toolkit from a DITA XML file:

I consider myself a metadata geek. I write about it, I work for a company that helps manage it, I track and play with the related standards, and I have a network of friends who fall into several of these categories.