INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

http://open.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/messing-around-with-metadata/

Jacob harris highlights the importance of metadata in News industry. And they have been using it since 1851 phew!!  

On a different note the following excerpt (from this article) touches upon the ‘automation vs manual’ tradeoff discussed in today’s class. 

“Still my snarky aside has truth to it: people are ultimately controlling the process. In the beginning, rules for the automatic extraction and tagging are set by an Information Architect. In the end, final approval and correction of suggested metadata is done by various Web producers before publication. Web producers also do the important job of accurately summarizing the story. So, while we have machines to help out the process, it’s still ultimately a human endeavor, largely because automated summarization and classification has its problems.”

The New York Times has created an API against their “taxonomy and controlled vocabulary used by Times indexers since 1851″.  Send their API a word and the NYTimes will send back a list of the most common relevant tags (and whether it’s a Person, Description, Organization or Location).  

Why create our own structured vocabulary when highly trained people have been doing it since 1851 and we can borrow theirs?