Medieval Metadata (was RE: Namespace Basic Principles)

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Bill dehOra writes:

 > To quote someone who knew a bit about metadata:
 > 
 > "I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book 
 > referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to 
 > find was not always to be informed."
 > 
 > Sam Johnson said that in 1753. We're still nowhere really.

Go back further and blame the early medieval monks -- they're the ones
(in western Europe, anyway) who started scribbling notes in the
margins of books so that people could look up references in other
books[*].  The Web is simply an incremental improvement on their
system.


All the best,


David

[*] Note that a book is a fully random-access scroll, a technical
prerequisite for dense linking.

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/