Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-07-02/Op-ed -Representing knowledge -- metadata, data, and linked data

“This piece examines a key question that new Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata are concerned with: how to properly represent knowledge digitally at the most basic level. There is a real danger that an inflexible, proscriptive approach to data will severely limit the scope, capabilities and ultimate utility of the resulting service. Within the Wikipedia community – Wikidata and elsewhere – there is a perceived utility in using more structured, machine-friendly formats to enable better information sharing and computer-assisted analysis and research. However, there remains a lot of debate about the best approach, to which I will contribute the views I have developed over nearly a decade of research and development projects at the Bodleian Library[1] and before that, through my involvement with knowledge management in the commercial domain. My first point is that metadata and data are really different aspects of a continuum. In the majority of cases, data acquires much of its meaning only in connection with its context, which is largely contained within so-called metadata. This is especially true for numerical data streams, but holds even for data in the form of text and images: when and where a text was written are often critical elements in understanding the meaning.[2] Data and metadata should be considered not as distinct entities but as complementary facets of a greater whole. Secondly, there will be no single unifying metadata ‘standard’ (or even a few such standards), so deal with it! For example, biosharing.org lists just under 200 metadata standards for experimental biosciences alone. The notion of a single standard that led to the development of MARC, and latterly RDA, in the library sphere is simply not applicable to the way in which metadata is now used within the field of academic enquiry. This means that any solution to handling digital objects must have a mechanism for handling a multiplicity of standards, and ideally within an individual object – for example, bibliographic, rights and preservation metadata may quite reasonably be encoded using different standards.[3] The corollary of this is that if we have such a mechanism there is no need to abandon existing standards prematurely. So how do we balance this proliferation of standards with the desire for sharing and interoperability? ...”