When I read Nate's response, I thought that the distinction is the endpoint of the process: The data is what the user goes looking for, the stuff that satisfies the desire that started their search. The metadata is the path to get there. Then I remembered the old example of a student consulting an author catalog to grab the person's birth & death dates for a school report rather than to find a work produced by that author. Then Joel added a whole new layer with that imagined hide & seek process built around the metadata (almost gamefication, really), and again the metadata becomes the destination not the path.
Is it a useful distinction to say the data's the *reason* for collecting the metadata in the first place? Without the need to give access to that copy of _A Tale of Two Cities_, either in a physical library or Google Books, the descriptive metadata never would be created. I'd agree with Nate that it doesn't matter much to the computer's processing routines, but to make the computer serve its user, those goals are paramount. Apologies if that's overly conceptual for a list with 'code' in the name. David ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:39:14 -0600 From: Nate Vack <njv...@wisc.edu> Subject: Re: Metadata [. . . snip]I think it's kind of a circular issue: We know metadata and data are separate because our software and workflow require it. Software and workflows are designed to separate metadata and data because we know they're separate. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:09:30 -0500 From: "Richard, Joel M" <richar...@si.edu> Subject: Re: Metadata [. . . snip]The contents of _A Tale of Two Cities_ can now be seen in so many different ways: a histogram of word frequency, a chart of which characters have the most dialogue, locations in the novel can be mapped geographically over the course of the story. (I only wish I had an interactive map when reading A Game of Thrones to tell me who was where at which part of the novel!) And you can then search for books that take place in certain cities, or in a time period, or have people who wear beige top hats in victorian England. The possibilities are endless! [snip . . . ]