Metadata is revealing more about users than plain data, and certainly more than they expected. The digital trail of activity can be traced all the way back and tell its own story of sorts. This interesting topic was covered in an article in The Hindu titled, “Digital crumbs together paint a larger picture.”
When users interact with connected devices, the protocols designed to facilitate these interactions result in substantial amounts of information gathering, almost automatically. This data about data is called ‘metadata’ and is at the heart of the national news’ latest controversy involving the U.S. National Security Agency.
This puts metadata in a less than positive light, and that is unfortunate. Metadata is valuable in making content searchable and findable.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
