Digital Earth Weblog

Most people in the spatial industry have some experience with metadata (ANZLIC, FGDC, ISO 19115, Dublin Core, etc). That experience is not always positive. Creating metadata is time consuming. The quality of metadata can be frustrating. Mostly it just sits in a repository and becomes out of date.

Metadata is a powerful tool, but only when it is actually used. Creating metadata just in case someone, somewhere, one day, maybe, might need it does not inspire good quality content (but there are some good reasons to do it anyway). Metadata that provides benefit to someone today is the metadata that gets the attention.

I came across a great example in a recent Inside the Net podcast. The Pandora music service, and the Music Genome Project.

The Pandora website lets you create your own personal radio stations. You train the Pandora application by telling it which artists or music tracks you like. It then uses metadata to select similar tracks from other artists which it then streams to you across the Internet. You can further refine the track selection by giving individual tracks the thumbs up or thumbs down.

It works, very well. I’ve discovered a lot of music that I didn’t know existed. The really interesting part is what makes this system work. Three factors stand out:

1. A metadatabase that stores about 400 discrete criteria describing each music track.
2. Around 40 formally educated musicians, on staff, who are trained to analyse each music track and populate the metadatabase in a consistent manner.
3. A software application that can exploit the metadata to provide value to the users of the service.

Wouldn’t it be great if spatial metadata projects had the same focus on providing immediate value, and the resourcing to achieve it.

[tags]metadata, music, software, radio[/tags]