Path: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu!spool.maxwell.syr.edu!drn.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news.glorb.com!news-hog.berkeley.edu!ucberkeley!tethys.csu.net!nntp.csufresno.edu!sn-xit-02!sn-xit-06!sn-post-02!sn-post-01!supernews.com!corp.supernews.com!not-for-mail From: Hugo Kornelis Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Subject: Re: "thou shalt not conflate meta-data with data" Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 12:28:17 +0100 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Message-ID: References: <1109619059.070731.107870@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com> <1109631835.715262.67950@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com> <1109640281.336832.293830@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com> <1109642943.271059.190480@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com> <4224afc5$0$12979$ed2619ec@ptn-nntp-reader02.plus.net> <1109711733.581194.3110@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com> <42264735$0$23601$ed2e19e4@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net> <1109816108.578749.154830@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.91/32.564 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@supernews.com Lines: 28 Xref: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu comp.databases.theory:30151 On 2 Mar 2005 18:15:08 -0800, Neo wrote: (snip) >Thus it seems, Morgan's definition that meta data is "data about data" >was along the right track, however it was too broad since male is data >about John, but male is not considered meta data. Hi Neo, John is not data. 'John' is data (it's the name of a person), but John (the actual person) is a person, not data. Names are not male or female. It's the person John who is male, not the name 'John'. Hence, male is data about a person, not metadata (at least not in this context). Metadata is generally not about individual occurences, but about collections (whether called sets, classes, domains, or anything else in the model of your choice). I wouldn't consider "the length of the name 'John'" to be metadata (though one might argue the opposite just as well). But "the maximum length of names for persons is 25 characters" is definitely metadata. Best, Hugo -- (Remove _NO_ and _SPAM_ to get my e-mail address)