Traditionally many businesses neglected the development of a complete and efficient metadata repository, because they did not realize the business benefit it can yield. It has clearly been an issue, related to the culture of the Business: how management appreciates the value of information and its use in decision making. Metadata in the form of data definition language (DDL) have been developed in RDBMS systems. However, these metadata have been limited to the structure of physical databases. They were not enriched with the addition of:
- definitions of business terms and acronyms
- explanations on the information structure
- business rules on entity types, entity type attributes or combinations of entities types.
In certain cases the documentation on the Enterprise information architecture has been kept in fragmented documents, stored in unlinked repositories or files. Furthermore, in some cases the documentation on certain complex information structures, has been very limited. Moreover, regarding unstructured data (like e-mail, documents etc), the ability to efficiently retrieve information on a specific topic, is often impeded by the lack of efficient content structure and/or descriptive metadata (e.g. semantic tags). On the Internet, the battle to attract attention has led to increased efforts to structure content in a way that can be highly accessible and usable. The ability to attract visitors is increasingly determined by the search engines which mediate between content and Users. A search engine is not able to ‘understand’ the topics covered by a web page unless it is assisted by metadata and rich text content. Rich and carefully written metadata like meta description and keywords sections in HTML pages, are facilitating the machine to understand and promote the content more efficiently. The central position of metadata on the Internet, stored in various forms like HTML meta tags, RSS / Atom feeds or sitemaps (e.g. Google sitemaps), is only going to be further strengthening and evolving to more efficient forms. The semantic web, a web of metadata, is under rapid development, aiming to optimize the accessibility and usability of existing Internet content. New ways to ‘explain’ the content to the search engines are currently under evolution. New methods to describe content topics and their relationship, have been proposed (e.g. XML Topic Maps - XTM). A new breed of feed management and promotion web services (e.g. feedburner.com, feedvalidator.org), are aiming to early-on capture a significant portion of the emerging feed management market, in order to achieve critical mass that will lead them to further development. The same principles and techniques can be used to manage and efficiently exploit intranet content. Metadata are needed to describe the structure of Enterprise information and facilitate its search and retrieval. Furthermore, Social networks, under rapid growth on the Internet, can also be applied in large Enterprises in order to exchange experience and tacit knowledge among professionals which are not acquainted and even work in different geographic sites. The whole effort to better structure & explain information, with the efficient use of metadata, presents enormous potential and is expected to dramatically influence future information management developments on the Internet as well as on the Enterprise intranet world. Copyright 2006 – Kostis Panayotakis
Material related to content management and data quality can be found at http://www.pleroforea.com
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