Brett Lider and Anca Mosoiu discuss the importance of metadata in organizing and using documents on public Web sites and intranets.
They make a good case that enterprises need a metadata strategy, not just for the Web sites directly, but for such tools as ERP. But I do take issue with some of their comments on content-management systems, such as:
"CMS as a publishing tool restricts what you can do with the website and how you can reuse your content. ... Users have to understand complicated file organization structures in order to be able to place their content in the right place."
We use a CMS and have no problems reusing content; nor do our users have to know anything about how files on the Web site are organized (they do have to know the difference between "news" and "opinion," but since we're a newspaper, that's sort of bred into them).
And I think anybody contemplating a metadata strategy needs to take into account the serious political ramifications of naming conventions: It's amazing how territorial people can get when it comes to deciding how to organize your metadata.
Via Brian Sweeting.
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