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A barefoot man wearing a blue suit approaches a clothes dryer full of socks of
every color imaginable. The socks are tangled and mismatched, so he starts
pulling them out, one by one, tossing each aside until he finds a pair to match
his outfit.
This scenario describes the current state of the Internet. With the Internet's
seemingly endless but tangled information, users can find themselves hunting
for "socks" they know are in there somewhere.
Now imagine the barefoot man approaching the dryer and finding a clean, folded
pair of blue socks on top waiting for him. Or better yet, the man decides to
wear his purple suit and--without questioning his taste--the dryer suggests
that black or dark gray socks will look best.
Helping Internet users find the information they need, even when they aren't
sure what they're looking for, is the purpose of a new international
cooperative effort led by Thomas D. Wason, director of research and evaluation
at the Institute for Academic Technology (http://www.iat.unc.edu).
The effort will establish new standards--called metadata--that will accurately
and thoroughly label information posted on the Internet so that users can find
it easier and faster. Recently Educom, a consortium of 600 major universities
working together to share technology and make it more useful, announced
specifications for the 35 metadata fields, along with their definitions.
The metadata effort is part of the Instructional Management Systems
(http://www.imsproject.org), an Educom project.
"When you go to a library, you look up a book's subject, author and title, and
then you go to the stacks to retrieve the book," Wason said. "Sometimes,
though, you'll be in the stacks and discover that a book three over from the
one you were looking for is really the book you need. But you can't do that on
the Internet."
The metadata will allow users to retrieve the exact information they need. For
example, look up "rock" on the Internet today, and you'll find information
about gems and minerals, Little Rock, Ark., rock music and the Hard Rock Cafe.
However, once metadata are put in place, Internet users who are interested in
"rock" as in geology can narrow down their searches to certain rock formations
in exact locations and other specific data.
"This effort has strong implications for education because it will be so much
easier to find things on the Internet than it is now, which will affect
research, teaching and learning," Wason said.
So far, Internet search engines such as Yahoo! and Netscape have agreed to use
metadata once the standards are developed, Wason said, and government agencies,
universities and private corporations all have expressed an interest, as well.
Organizations as diverse as the U.S. Department of Defense, Microsoft, IBM,
Apple, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the University of Michigan and Carolina
are helping fund the metadata effort.
"These agencies are saying we need these standards to work together," he
said.
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