thinkwhere

Jo Walsh blogs on mappinghacks.com about metadata, cataloguing standards, and the importance of just getting something out there which will be easy to read, use and develop upon. It got me thinking about some incentives to publish or “write stuff about stuff”, since no one writes metadata at all, at the moment.

Metadata as marketing?

“Why would someone else want to see this dataset?”

Within a context of sharing and community (perhaps I should use Architectures of Participation?) – and FOSS approaches to geodata encourages both of these – I can imagine it being like putting a description on a video that you have just uploaded to your video sharing site of choice. It should encourage feedback and commenting on data, such as “by the way, this is out of date now….see X” or… “I’ve used this dataset on my Website, here”. It would give two way feedback, instead of just publishing metadata, doing the painful duty, and forgetting about it.

However, what about the data that you have to release, but don’t care about sharing, or are not allowed to, or where sharing is a formality. Not all publishing of information is viewed as a positive thing? Perhaps all data would benefit from comments.