DLM Forum’s triennial conference 2011: Interoperability – Metadata for interoperability: practical issues and advice Marc Fresko, Director, Inforesight (UK)

Metadata for interoperability: practical issues and advice

Marc Fresko, Director, Inforesight (UK)

Marc Fresko treated the audience with a view on metadata: why there are of use and which ones you need.

He also compared the different standards and guidelines on metadata and concluded that they couldn’t be mixed. He even doubted the value of some standards.

I tended to disagree on most of his comparisons, but he did have some valuable remarks on practical issues surrounding metadata:

• Before you can develop your metadata elements, you need to understand the entities you want to describe;
• start with an entity model
• be prepared to let it evolve

• One also needs
• controlled vocabularies
• governance regime

• The metadata for one organization should
• relate closely to specific software
• resist the temptation to develop a metadata model without specific software in mind

• Use a tabular representation
• express the schema in XML
• use software to relate the tables to the XML

• Only include metadata you truly need
• don’t include metadata just because you can
• do include metadata that helps you manage

All very good and very practical points. 

What I really disagreed on however was the notion that all engineering should be done by the records managers. Nowhere the business owners or content owners were mentioned. I tend to think that metadata is not only about records management, but also and very much so on use.

In any event: it was a session that made me think.