The Mega World of Metadata
We rely on the advantages of metadata regularly but may not even know it. For example, imagine you’re making winter travel plans to go skiing. You know your jacket has seen better days, so you decide to hop onto your computer, go to your favorite online retailer, and enter the word skiing in the search box. What results will you get back?
Having just entered that keyword, I see that over 10,000 results are waiting for me! To get ready for the trip, we may eventually need clothes, equipment, some lip balm, or even a movie about skiing to get us in the mood, but what we need right now is a jacket. Rather than page through 10,000 results 20 items at a time, we can use metadata to filter our search.
Maybe we choose a department to limit the results to clothing, a favorite brand, a price range, or a condition (new or used). Any time we use information that describes a thing but is not inherent in that thing, we are using metadata. Metadata is sometimes...
