This week in school has been all about the pleasures and discontents of metadata. For those who may be wondering what the heck metadata is, it is, simply put, data about data. It is not just digital either. Back in the days of card catalogs, those cards were metadata. These days, of course, it is much more sexy to talk about digital metadata. Metadata is so important because it makes things easier to find. The bibliographic records on Amazon.com are metadata that help you find the book you want.
This is the age of Google you say, why can’t we just do natural language full text searching to find everything? Because more often than not the really good stuff, the 5 documents that would really be most useful, are buried somewhere in the 1,698,376 result hits you got back. Just imagine if all those web pages, news articles, pdfs, and sundry other internet files out there had good metadata attached to them. You think the internet is useful now, if it had good metadata attached to everything it would be even more incredibly amazing and useful and fun.
That’s where the idea of the semantic web comes in. The idea behind the semantic web is to use special metadata vocabularies written in RDF (resource description framework), a special form of XML, the language most webpages are currently written in, to create machine-readable metadata about the content of a webpage or other web file.
But it is about more than just cataloging the web and making information easier to find. Once all this data can be read by machines, our machines can be programmed to do all kinds of interesting things with it. For instance, I had to write a review paper this week on a metadata schema called FOAF (Friend of a Friend). FOAF is designed for social networking. If I had a FOAF file embedded on my blog, for instance, I might include information in it about myself that would tell a computer that my name is Stefanie, I live in Minneapolis, I am attending Drexel’s library school, I work at a law library, I also have a Twitter account, am on Facebook and Delicious, am married to Bookmanjames, and know the following people X, Y, Z. Presuming the people I know also have FOAF files I can link my file to theirs.
Then the fun begins. Because my friend, X, has on her FOAF file a list of people she knows and links to their FOAF files and so on and so on. You can then find an application that will create for you a social graph (there are several rudimentary ones available and Google is working on one too) that will show you all your friends and their friends and their friends (friend of a friend, get it?).
Why is something like FOAF better than Facebook? Because FOAF transcends social networking sites. Your social graph can show you that friend X on Facebook knows friend Z on Twitter and they both have a friend, A. This is information about your friends that you had no clue about. Why would you want to? Because networking can be fun and useful.
Fun, in that you can suddenly play Six Degrees of Separation and find out whether you can connect yourself to Kevin Bacon or someone else. Useful because you can discover that X and Z’s friend A has a friend H who works at the very place you have always dreamed of getting a job. You can have your friends X and Z introduce you and recommend you to A who you will likely get along with and who can then introduce you to H and next thing you know you are interviewing for your dream job. Or maybe H has that rare book you have been looking for and is willing to sell it to you. Or maybe H has a friend with a lake cabin on the market that is exactly where and what you’ve been looking for and because you are a friend of a friend, is willing to overlook all the other bids on it and sell it to you.
See how it works? And that is only metadata for social networking. There are loads and loads of other metadata schema out there that do other things and could potentially revolutionize the web. All this is only just getting going and hasn’t even begun to scratch the surface yet, but it is pretty interesting and pretty exciting. Imagine what it can do for libraries.
Another great post; I am impressed how you can explain that in language I can understand. Thank you.
Bruce, thanks! That means a lot to me.
It would also make the FBI’s job much easier…
Hah! I hadn’t thought of that! I’ve always wondered if I should write to the FBI under the freedom of information act and request to see what is in my FBI file. But then I never go farther than that because I don’t want them to write back and tell me I am not interesting enough to even have a file!
Hi Stefanie,
I just stopped by to tell you I love to read your posts, cause I’m a passionate book lover too.
Greetings from Croatia!
Hi Iva in Croatia! Thanks for stopping by and thanks for your kind words!
This sounds very interesting. I’ll admit that I’m feeling a bit of information overload at the moment, and am not sure I want to know about a friend of a friend, but in my less overwhelmed moments, I could get excited about this! It will surely transform how we use the internet.
Dorothy, it is a lot to take in. If you had seen me last week as I was trying to grasp it all you would have seen a confused, cross-eyed, wrinkled brow person!
What a fun post! You did an awesome job explaining it all.
(Oh and how do you like Drexel? I looked into their library science program years go, when I was decided between that or psychology. I opted the therapy degrees instead, but still ponder going back !)
Thank you Christina! I hope my professor feels the same way about the paper I had to write on it! I like Drexel quite a lot. Attending school online is a lot of work but the flexibility and convenience of it makes it worthwhile. If you decide to attend Drexel, be sure to become a student member of the ALA first (really cheap) and then ask the Drexel people for the tuition discount. It’s not much, but it is worth it.
Why does FOAF sound scarier to me than the government being allowed to know every book I’ve checked out of the library?
I suppose it could be scary. But you are the one in control of what information gets coded and really, it isn’t much more than what you already publish on a blog. But I suppose the scary part is being able to link it all together?