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> "Do we throw out metadata, then? Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful (...) often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that f
by stareatgoats 5y ago
> "Do we throw out metadata, then?
Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful (...) often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet"
Could it be that over-confidence in metadata was common around this time (turn of the millennium), then everyone realized the limitations of meta-data as illustrated in the article, subsequently dropping meta-data approaches altogether, forgetting that it is also useful.
So now we have a situation where the pendulum is now at the other extreme, where machine-generated classification barely intersects with human-generated meta-data at all.
The sweet spot seems to lie somewhere in the middle, as Aristotle used to say.
- nerdponx 5y ago> machine-generated classification barely intersects with human-generated meta-data at all What do you mean by this? A big part of the reason that deep learning was a major advancement is the fact that it helps you extract data from metadata in a semi-automated (and increasingly automated) fashion. Maybe the difference is that we gave up trying to "make sense of" the metadata in any kind of universal way.
- gego 5y agoWe outsourced generation of high quality training data, resulting in Wikipedia being one of the few (and quite messy) people can play around with... garbage in, garbage out. And to be fair, most people who lovingly curated special knowledge databases only to see them get used to train machines (without any acknowledgement) discouraged them to continue and resulted in a drop of good training sources (at least in my field and non-english language)...
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago>So now we have a situation where the pendulum is now at the other extreme, where machine-generated classification barely intersects with human-generated meta-data at all. The problem is that human metadata has a pretty solid barrier, but the barriers of what machine metadata can do keeps shifting due to increases in technology, therefore people keep investing in machine processes because they do not yet seem to have reached their limit.
- erikpukinskis 5y agoWhat barrier is that?
- bryanrasmussen 5y agowell I guess it is barriers, as per the article - 2.1 People lie 2.2 People are lazy 2.3 People are stupid but there is also the obvious scalability issue regarding people adding metadata - if one person can add metadata to 100 files per hour and you have 1 million files a day you will need a large team of people adding metadata.
- lmm 5y agoNah. That line was a sop to the metadata advocates by pretending that some forms of useful not-metadata (or at least not capital-M Metadata) are actually metadata. Sometimes we overcorrect when an overhyped technology doesn't live up to expectations. But other times there really is no there there and the whole thing is just completely useless.
- prionassembly 5y agoThe Middle Path was "folksonomies".