Hi Owen,

when you say, “I suspect the problem with structure is that in order for it to be meaningful we have to all agree on the same structure”, is that something you think or an attitude you encounter? Can you expand on this a bit more?

RSS or microformats do seem like a solution that’s “good enough” for the purposes of our projects in the meantime, rather than waiting for a top-down project to have meetings for five years and agree on the ideal museum metadata structure? The artwork microformat (http://microformats.org/wiki/work-of-art) is one lightweight solutions; it wouldn’t work for all museum objects but it’s a start.

I’m wondering if the idea of the ‘perfect structure’ that can deal with all the peculiarities of all possible museum objects is a bit like the idea of the ‘ontology of everything’ that put people off putting out their local ontologies as they are and finding ways to link them to other ontologies as they’re used.

cheers, Mia
(hi Mikes!)