WebSitesOfNote

Metadata Quality and Mapping Between Domain Languages: "One part of the XML vision that has always resonated with me is that it encourages people to build custom XML formats specific to their needs but allows them to map between languages using technologies like XSLT. However XML technologies like XSLT focus on mapping one kind of syntax for another. There is another school of thought from proponents of Semantic Web technologies like RDF, OWL, and DAML+OIL, etc that higher level mapping between the semantics of languages is a better approach.  In previous posts such as RDF, The Semantic Web and Perpetual Motion Machines and More on RDF, The Semantic Web and Perpetual Motion Machines I've disagreed with the thinking of Semantic Web proponents because in the real world you have to mess with both syntactical mappings and semantic mappings. A great example of this is shown in the post entitled On the Quality of Metadata... by Stefano Mazzocchi where he writes One thing we figured out a while ago is that merging two (or more) datasets with high quality metadata results in a new dataset with much lower quality metadata. The 'measure' of this quality is just subjective and perceptual, but it's a constant thing: everytime we showed this to people that cared about the data more than the software we were writing, they could not understand why we w"