Hi Owen

Thanks for the insight and thoughts – interesting, and I agree very much about the “more structure is better” concept.

When I was over working with Google in Paris I asked them about metadata and their line was “We love metadata. We just assume it won’t be there”. And that for me is an excellent way of approaching this stuff.

It all comes down to the barriers that are put up by perfection. I’ve blogged LOADS about this and it’s the same thing again and again: perfection and structure is great but it has a tendancy (particularly in institutions like universities, museums and libraries, where accuracy is – arguably – the backbone of those insitutions) to become a blocker rather than an enabler.

The point you make about structured data becoming unstructured on the web is a great one, and I hadn’t really focussed on this. I guess again it comes down to finding the best ways of presenting data in a format which is readable, as structured as it can be, but also *commonly supported*. Which is why a JPEG is always going to be a better option than RAW, even though it’s not – strictly – “better”…

Cheers

Mike