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

> As for your desire of finding a rule Neo, simply conducting an
> observation of X in isolation can not determine if X is meta data or
> not. However if its context is considered you will be much better
> placed to have a wild guess! Cheers, Frank.

By asking what is meta data or what steps can be used to identify if X is meta data, I didn't mean to imply that the definition or method must be in isolation. I didn't think I would need to specify this as everything is in context to other things (are you aware of any exception). In the various examples of meta data, there is a common denominator. It would be nice to know the common denominator so that different persons applying it to new situations would agree that X (in context to Y) is meta data.

Thanks for the excellent example. In that example, it seems meta data is data that provides structure for other data. Or may be even more precisely, meta data is data that fills in the missing info in other data. For example, in the tuple (John, Male), meta data tells us the tuple is a person, the first value is the name of the person, and the second value is the gender of the person. Without the meta data or different meta data, the same tuple might mean a dormitory owned by John and the dormitory only houses males. The meaning of the tuple and its value are unknown without the meta data. I think this is why frosty said that the attributes Sex and Age in the relation header are meta data with respect to values Male and 48 for John. Received on Sat Mar 05 2005 - 04:29:39 CET