We used to write important information on the back of photographs. Today they are digital, but we would still like to remember, years from now, where who and what is in those photos we took.
Wrestling the information into the filename might be a good idea. It assures us that the metadata (descriptive info) is copied along with the data (the file). However, it’s not an elegant solution for most common filesystems, since they place restrictions on the length of filenames and character sets used. Ideally, a block of descriptive metadata should replace filenames altogether.
Most modern file formats include an internal metadata format (JPEG has Exif, MP3 has ID3), and maybe the solution is to use several metadata implementations (de facto standards). But what I need is to be able to take a piece of text, an image, or a web page snapshot, and associate it to an arbitrary file. I also want the associated data to accessible from the context of that file, be it that of a text viewer, media player, or file manager.
Is there a metadata standard, or is that just an oxymoron? I mean, metadata can be, by definition, all types of data. So writing such a standard would mean to anticipate all future kinds of data.
Is metadata necessary? You can argue that there is no end to metadata and that it’s pointless. Yet we still find ourselves appending notes to images, tagging cats, and blogging about other people’s creations.
