Practical Metadata

An article from Sean McGrath on Metadata asserts that there is a natural delay between creating information resources and understanding them. This natural delay is called hysteresis. His solution to this problem is to let creators create content and categorizers (or metadata experts) add the metadata at a later time. I disagree with this as a general principle because it increases the cost side of the metadata equation without being able to concretely define the commensurate value received. In an ideal world, the majority of metadata can be added at the point of creation with the flexibility to add additional metadata afterwards. I previously worked on a project called the Virtual Knowledge Base where we devised a scheme to enable multiple layers of metadata where we differentiatied between machine-generated versus human-generated metadata (and allowed multiple layers of both).
Our key takeaway principle is this: Don't put the metadata cart before the business value horse.
Since metadata is extrinsic information, it is either automated (ideal solution and zero cost), semi-automated and done at the point of creation (small cost) or worth the cost of adding it after the fact. The last option is the last one for good reason.
The article uses the term "about-ness" to describe metadata and I think this is a superb, though made-up, word. Let's add that one to key terms in our new definition of metadata. Our current list of terms for our new definition of metadata are:

1. description
2. context
3. "about-ness"