Metadata Now Fair Game
November 2, 2009
The US legal system has spoken. I saw the ZDNet UK story “Watch Out, Your Metadata Is Showing” and chuckled. Not long ago in goose years, legal eagles realized that the Word fast save function preserved text once in a document. Sending the document with fast save activated could allow the curious to see the bits and pieces of document that were once believed to be deleted from that document. Exciting stuff. Now the Arizona supreme court, according to Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe, “has decided that the metadata of a document is governed by the same rules as the document. With value-added indexing coming to most SharePoint systems, there will be some interesting discussions about what metadata is the document’s metadata and which metadata are part of another, broader system. If you read vendors’ enthusiastic descriptions of what their smart software will assign to documents, users, and system processes, you will enter into an interesting world. How exciting will be be? Consider a document that has metadata such as date of creation, file format, and the name of the author. Now consider a document that has metadata pertaining to the “aboutness” of a document, who looked at the document, who made which change and when, and who opened the document and for how long. Interesting stuff in my opinion. The courts will be entering data space soon, and I think that journey will be difficult. Next up? A metadata specialist at your local Top 10 law firm. Get your checkbook ready.
Stephen Arnold, November 2, 2009
I say, no pay.
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