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

On 3 Mar 2005 11:16:11 -0800, Neo wrote:

>> 'John' is data (it's the name of a person),
>> but John (the actual person) is a person, not data
>
>Even the actual person John is data within a larger system, the
>universe.

Hi Neo,

Luckily, I'm not responsible for moddelling the universe. I'll just leave that task to God / Allah / Jahwe / Coincidence / Vishna / whatever you choose to believe in.

(Personally, I don't consider the universe a system and I don't consider myself to be data, but YMMV - this discussion would be off-topic in this group and I'm not subscribed to any group where it would be on-topic)

> It seems your
>understanding of data includes values but not tuples (which is fine by
>me).

I have no idea what led you to believe that.

> According to your understanding, what is data (not examples of
>data)?

In the context of data vs metadata, I consider all information a customer (a paying one, preferably) wants to store about whatever entities he or she has to deal within his/her business in order to optimze that business to be data.

(snip the parts we agree on)
>While the above possibly provides yet more examples of meta data, it
>evades the fundamental definition or providing a step-by-step method of
>determining if X is meta data. What is meta data (not what are examples
>of meta data)?

I doubt if there is such a method. I even doubt if the statement "X is metadata" (or "X is not metadata") can ever be true, since the same thing can be data in one context, metadata in another context and neither in a third context.

One method that usually works for me is to ask myself who would be dealing on a daliy basis with the data. If it's the end user, it's data; if it's the developer, it's metadata.

In the context of a personnel administration database, the typical developer should not be interested in John's age or the deparment where Mary works, but he should be interested in the derivation rule that calculates John's age from his day of birth and the current date, and the foreign key that ensures that an employee can only work for a department that actually exists. For an end user, the reverse holds true. Hence, in this case John's age (46) and Mary's department (Front Desk) are data; the derivation rule and the constraint are metadata.

Best, Hugo

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