“Spent a week in a dusty library waiting for some words to jump at me” Camera Obscura.

Kas Thomas in his contribution to Julian Wraith’s popular thread on the future of content management really managed to make me disagree, the first of the posts that has!

The theme of this blog (yes it has got one) is that content management is changing as the web way of working starts to infiltrate the enterprise. And the web way of metadata is not what the old document oriented way was.

Kas says “Keeping knowledge about a file separate from the file itself is a hugely important concept.”

Looking at that point first. Look at any newish document format, from PDF/A to EXIF via the HTML meta tag, even a Word document and you will find embedded metadata. Remember that documents are emailed around, generally get lost. Metadata is the dog collar with a name and phone number on, saying version me and send me home. This trend is not going away, documents are becoming self contained.

Kas then continues “A file’s metadata becomes its interface to the outside world. It’s like a service descriptor.” That is simply not the way the web works. Resources use self describing formats like HTML for core data, and then all the other important metadata is linking information. It used to be that you had a blob file type and a program that could understand it, that was the basis for the desktop architecture, but that is not the case any more, even on the desktop you have a choice of applications that can understand a given file type, and your choice depends on what you can do with them. The web architecture goes much further, and resources become fully self-describing, a browser can understand all the web as every resource carries its own description, and bundled code to help you interpret it. A web page is its own service descriptor, and defines application state through hyperlinks. The web architecture has never had service descriptions.

There is one vital part of metadata that is not kept with a file, that is the link. Kas says “content, on the whole, is becoming richer, less structured”, missing out completely on the big picture that content is being structured by the imposition of links onto it, by its transformation into a hypertext, that creates a much richer structure than the individual documents have in themselves. Documents contain metadata about other documents in the form of links. The semantic web project is an attempt to add further richness to this structure. “What does the trend toward richer, less structured content mean for management of content?” well that means that content management is going to be about managing those links and relations between items, a lot more than it is now, when it came from a background of just managing documents, each an isolated item.

In a way that does come back to “Keeping knowledge about a file separate from the file itself” but not at all in the way Kas was trying to argue. Now time to link this to his argument to create a structured discussion…

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