Data Management and Metadata Essay -- Computer Science

"Although fully searchable text could, in theory, be retrieved without much metadata in the future, it is hard to imagine how a complex or multimedia digital object that goes into storage of any kind could ever survive, let alone be discovered and used, if it were not accompanied by good metadata" (Abby Smith). Discuss Smith's assertion in the context of the contemporary information environment Introduction In the world of preservation and library science the common focus is on preserving content, ensuring its longevity, findability, and a stable consistent metadata and technology solution, However we live in an age where everyone is a publisher of some form, and more consistently the content they produce will be in a digital rather than analogue form. Within that content there will always be varying amounts of metadata, some will be populated with an immense detail and granularity, some content will have been created with no human intervention to add additional information to it. In fact much of the digital material produced will have been done so by people who have no concept of metadata, and no inclination to know about it or time to use it. The question raised by Smiths statement highlights many of the issues around data preservation and digital content, with metadata only being a part of those issues, but integral to the ongoing management of the massive influx of digital content being produced. Metadata Issues Lets begin with a potentially frightening piece of I.T. market research. â€Å" In 2010 the amount of digital information created and replicated worldwide was nearly 1,203 exabytes, (an exabyte is billion gigabytes or 1018 bytes)† IDC [1] With the amount of data growing exponentially year on year one could ask, ... ... 9. http://annotator.imense.com/info/ accessed 12-12-2010 10. http://www.virage.com/rich-media/index.htm accessed 12-12-2010 11. Board, Technology Strategy, Metadata production tools MAINSTREAM COLLABORATIVE R & D FUNDING Metadata production tools 2011 http://www.innovateuk.org/_assets/pdf/competition-documents/metadataproductiontoolscompetition.pdf accessed 02-01-2011 12. Bulterman, D.C.a., â€Å"Is it time for a moratorium on metadata?† IEEE Multimedia 11, no. 4 (October 2004): 10-17 (Bulterman, 2004) 13. Shah, Chirag. â€Å"ContextMiner: Supporting the Mining of Contextual Information for Ephemeral Digital Video Preservation.† International Journal of Digital Curation 4, no. 1 (2009): 175-192. http://ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/111. 14. http://tagger.steve.museum/ accessed 21/12/2010 15. http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ accessed 21/12/2010 .