Muddiest Points 5

I have no muddiest point this week.

Unit 6 Readings - XML Tutorials

While these XML tutorials had a lot of good information, I feel some information overload. I think I need to do some exercises to really cement these concepts and the vocabulary in my head. In the future, these tutorials will be great reference material.

Readings:

1. Martin Bryan.  Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML)
2. Doug Tidwell, Introduction to XML
3. Uche Ogbuji. A survey of XML standards: Part 1. January 2004. 
4. XML Schema Tutorial 

Unit 5 Readings

Border Crossings

The notion that uncontrolled vocabularies – community-based, emergent vocabularies – might play an important role in aggregation and discovery occasions a certain discomfort for those schooled in formal information management. Whether it is just the latest fad, or an important emerging trend, remains to be seen.

There seems to be a new drive, especially online, to crowdsource, DIY, and make in a community setting that does not necessarily set down standards of operations, but rather finds a way to meld together many different ways of accomplishing goals. I am not surprised that this idea has gained traction within the metadata community. I wonder if the answer between formalized information management and this new grassroots effort is some combination of the two.

Then again, I tend to be a grassroots, crowdsourcing, DIY kind of girl so it may simply be my bias showing.

Intro to Metadata

·         The structure of an information object being metadata is a new concept for me. When I think metadata I am mostly thinking about content and sometimes context.

·         Is metadata one of the reasons many public libraries do not have on cohesive catalog containging digital and non-digital items?

·                        Although metadata is arguably a much less familiar term among creators and consumers of networked digital content who are not information professionals per se, these same individuals are increasingly adept at creating, exploiting, and assessing user-contributed metadata such as Web page title tags, folksonomies, and social bookmarks.

Are these creators and consumers shaping the way metadata is used? How do they learn about affective metadata? Is it simply trial and error?

Metadata for Digital Libraries

It is in providing the 'glue' that would underlie the service orientation of future directions that an integrated metadata strategy would have its most profound impact, and it is for that reason that its adoption should be argued for at the highest

This is definitely a call for more formal information management. It would allow for less mess, as it says earlier in this article.

Muddiest Point 4

I have no muddiest point this week.