Metadata Are Important. Good to Know.

March 16, 2011

I read “When it Comes to Securing and Managing Data, It’s all about the Metadata.” The goslings and I have no disagreement about the importance of metadata. We do prefer words and phrases like controlled term lists, controlled vocabularies, classification systems, indexing, and geotagging. But metadata is hot so metadata the term shall be.

There is a phase that is useful when talking about indexing and the sorts of things in our preferred terms list. That phrase is “editorial policy.” Today’s pundits, former English majors, and unemployed Webmasters like the word “governance.” I find the word disconcerting because “governance” is unfamiliar to me. The word is fuzzy and, therefore, ideal for the poobahs who advise organizations unable to find content on the reasons for the lousy performance of one or more enterprise search systems.

The article gallops through these concepts. I learned about the growing issue of managing and securing structured and semi structured data within the enterprise. (Isn’t this part of security?) I learned about collaborative content technologies are on the increase which is an echo of locking a file which several people edit in an authoring system.)

I did notice this factoid:

IDC forecasts that the total digital universe volume will increase by a factor of 44 in 2020. According to the report, unstructured data and metadata have an average annual growth rate of 62 percent. More importantly, high-value information is also skyrocketing. In 2008, IDC found that 22 to 33 percent of the digital universe was high-value information (data and content that are governed by security, compliance and preservation obligations). Today, IDC forecasts that high-value information will comprise close to 50 percent of the digital universe by the end of 2020.

There you go. According to the article, metadata framework technology is a large part of the answer to this problem to collect user and group information, permissions information, access activity, and sensitive content indicators.

My view is to implement an editorial policy for content. Skip the flowery and made-up language. Get back to basics. That would be what I call indexing, a component addressed in an editorial policy. Leave the governance to the government. The government is so darn good at everything it undertakes.

Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2011

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Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Indexing, Management, News, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.