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

From: FrankHamersley <FrankHamersleyZat_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Sun, 06 Mar 2005 11:26:22 GMT
Message-ID: <yNBWd.186476$K7.71584@news-server.bigpond.net.au>

Neo wrote:

>>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.

The (lowest) comon denominator is that X is data...after that every thing else is context.

> Thanks for the excellent example. In that example, it seems meta data
> is data that provides structure for other data.

IMO it doesn't "provide structure" ... it describes it.

> Or may be even more
> precisely, meta data is data that fills in the missing info in other
> data.

Not universally although you could build a data storage system with this   attribute.

> 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.

Personally I don't see this extent of business rules being tightly coupled to the data storage system as positive (yet). Maybe that's because I am a Neanderthal, but right now I don't have a problem getting my mind around the constraints imposed by the current state of the art.

Cheers, Frank. Received on Sun Mar 06 2005 - 05:26:22 CST