Re: "thou shalt not conflate meta-data with data"

> A person is not data.
> A name is data. An age is data.

So what is the fundamental distinction between data and not data? That way I can also tell if X is or isn't data.

> If you had one field that had "M" and "48" in it, and
> another field with "Sex" and "Age" in it, then the former
> would be data and the latter would be metadata.

If a db models "john is a person, john is male AND male is a gender" is male data or meta data? Can the same thing (ie male) be both data and meta data? And john would not be data according to you since john is a person. Is this what you meant?

> Should be pretty clear to a person; might confuse a 'bot.

So what is the fundamental distinction between data and meta data? It wasn't clear. Received on Mon Feb 28 2005 - 17:03:55 CST