Metadata has taken a serious blow. Despite the value it adds to findability and comprehensive search, the fear that “big brother” was listening in on every phone call you had with your mother made metadata a bad word. This interesting topic came from The Hill in their article, “NSA chief: Paris-style attack ‘makes life a lot harder‘.

Perspective is key here. The tragedy of the attacks in Paris last month provides that much-needed perspective. The sadness and horror that happened illustrates an increasing challenge for intelligence officials.

We now rely on properly applied metadata to search at the speed we need to find the data we seek. However, if you don’t have the data properly indexed against a solid taxonomy to begin with, searching with speed will not get you very far.

A strong standards-based taxonomy is one with true integrity. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.