Concepts Assignment - 3 - Meta Data

11 - The relationship of data to meta-data

A great failing of most web browser and management software is its inability to allow people to easily organize and reorganise information, to catalogue and sort it, thereby attaching their own metadata to it. Without the physical ability to sort, annotate, sort and resort, it is harder to do the cognitive processing necessary to make the data ‘one’s own’, relevant to the tasks that you are using it for, rather than its initially intended uses. New forms of ‘organisation’ need to be found, and new software to make it work.(Allen, n.d.)

I’ve chosen this concept because I think it is becoming outdated. There are now opportunities to organise, reorganise, catalogue, share and sort our online information, particularly bookmarks. Applications are available online that allow users to add Meta Data to their bookmarks and we will see that this is becoming an extremely powerful tool in everyday web browsing.

Sometimes it can take a long time to find the information you are looking for on the net. Search engines can help, but often it requires filtering through a lot of irrelevant sites before you come across quality information. One good thing is that when we finally find these quality sites we can bookmark them, allowing us to return whenever we want without having to find the site again. Can you imagine all the bookmarks saved on computers all over the world? Bookmarks that have been saved by real human beings who can analyse the quality of a document instead of a search engine algorithm that can only understand the words that a document contains. Imagine if there was a way in which you could search other people’s quality bookmarks in order to find the best information possible. Well now you can. It is facilitated by a new online application called Social Bookmarking (Arundel, 2005).

Social Bookmarking is an online application that allows users to store, organise and share bookmarks (Learn More about Delicious, n.d.). However instead of storing bookmarks in our web browser, we store them in our online profile on our Social Bookmarking website. For the sake of this argument we’ll talk about Delicious, one of the more popular Social Bookmarking sites. Delicious allows us to save our bookmarks on a centralised server, meaning that we can retrieve our bookmarks from any computer connected to the Internet. However the most powerful feature of Delicious is the ability to add Meta Data to our bookmarks. We can tag our bookmarks with keywords in order to classify them. So if you found a site with a good recipe you could tag it with the keywords ‘pork’, ‘casserole’. Then when you want to find it again you just need to search for those words in order to retrieve it. Because we are on a social network we can then make our bookmarks public which means anybody can see them. So if someone from another country searches for a page with the Meta Data ‘pork casserole’, your bookmark will come up in a list ordered by ranking. Ranking is determined by the number of Delicious users who have saved a particular bookmark.

An example of another useful feature would be if you were doing an assignment. With Delicious you could tag each of these pages with the words ‘Science’, ‘Assignment’ and make them private which means other users cannot see those bookmarks. This Meta Data allows you to search for those words, and all the information you found that is relevant will show up. By making it private you prevent people from finding that information which may not be relevant to their own search of ‘science assignment’.
Meta Data and Social Bookmarking give us the opportunity to organise our bookmarks as well as to search for others that may be more relevant than what a search engine presents. Therefore user generated Meta Data is becoming a powerful tool in everyday web browsing.

Site 1:
Bartholme, J. (2007, April 8). Benefits of Being Saved on Delicious. Retrieved February 1, 2009, from Jason Bartholme's Blog: http://www.jasonbartholme.com/benefits-of-being-saved-on-delicious/

Jason’s post talks about the advantages of getting your page saved on Delicious. By having meta data attached to it in Delicious, people can search for you page much like they would in a search engine, therefore drawing visitors to your site. I think that this whole concept of user generated search tags will become more important in the future, and while I’m not saying it will rival Google, it will allow search results to become more relevant as it is real people who are tagging it with relevant keywords.

Site 2:
7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking. (2005, May). Retrieved February 1, 2009, from Educause: http://educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf

This downloadable PDF is a great introduction to Social Bookmarking. This plainly states what it does, plus advantages and disadvantages. It draws a good point when it places criticism on the fact that a lot of bookmarking is done by amateurs. Meta Data that is irrelevant or insufficient to categorize a particular source is an outcome of this, thus lowering the relevancy of searches. However it brings back the light and explains the potential that social bookmarking and user generated Meta Data has in saving us time when trying to find relevant data.

Bibliography
Arundel, R. (2005). Social Bookmarking Tools for Collaberation and Interaction. Retrieved February 1, 2009, from Speaking and Marketing Tips: http://www.speakingandmarketingtips.com/social-bookmarking.html

Learn More about Delicious. (n.d.). Retrieved February 1, 2009, from Delicious: http://delicious.com/help/learn