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GCN Home > 01/09/06 issue

To tag or not to tag

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Last fall, federal content managers in Washington buzzed over the issue of metadata. Should agencies take the trouble of including metadata with the content they produce? Or is it unnecessary, a quaint practice to be rendered obsolete by the exponentially growing power of computer processors? It’s a question that will resonate throughout 2006.

The source of all the excitement was a request for information issued jointly by the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration. The RFI queried industry about the current state of search technology. In particular, it raised the question of whether metadata tags for electronic documents were really necessary. Specifically, the RFI asked, “Does current search technology perform to a sufficiently high level to make an added investment in metadata tagging unnecessary in terms of cost and benefit?”

The responses were mixed, to say the least. Approximately 56 percent of respondents saw no need for preparing material for search engines, according to a GSA summary of the RFI results issued in December. The commercial search engine community is confident that its products can answer queries without hours of manually cataloging the material ahead of time. Call it the brute-force approach; let big machines ingest everything and then match it to your needs on the fly. And with Moore’s Law upping processor power at a prodigious rate, search may well exponentially improve as time goes on.

Forty-four percent of the RFI’s respondents, however, felt differently (respondents to the RFI included industry experts, agency officials and academics). They insisted that documents need to be annotated before they are posted for public consumption, either by adding tags identifying their context, creating controlled vocabularies for their classification or by manually cataloging the items.

“Metadata can improve search, if it’s done using a structured vocabulary by trained experts,” said Chris Sherman, associate editor for the Search Engine Watch Web site. “We’re seeing computers increasingly be able to do categorization automatically, rather than relying on human taxonomies.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Knowledge Management, Management



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