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25 Feb 2006
Metadata versus MicroContent
For a time I have been struggling between the concepts Metadata and MicroContent. I still have not yet found a nice definition for these two concepts. While investigating various MicroContent Clients the difference became a bit clearer. Several MicroContent Clients support the idea of an Inspector. The inspector presents information that is often not visible in the View-pane. It presents information that is less important to the user. I categorise this Inspector data as the Metadata. Thus we can distinguish a few characteristics for Metadata.
Hidden - metadata is often hidden. When a user looks at MicroContent he will not see the MicroContent.
Implicit - often metadata is not created by the user. It is created implicitly by the Client or Service.
Unimportant - usually metadata is not of prime importance for using MicroContent Items.
Examples of metadata are the creation date, modification date and author of an MicroContent Item.