Category Archives: Information Philosophy

What are information and data? How do they represent what they represent? What are we doing when we record and use information? These questions are philosophical, but also deeply pragmatic. This category collects posts that deal more with this sort of question than with technical issues.

Geoff Nunberg on Google Books metadata

Posted on 2009-09-03 by Dan Rabin

Linguist Geoff Nunberg comments on the poor general quality of metadata in Google Books, and why that’s a problem. It’s a tough problem: if you do things (like scanning entire libraries) at Google-scale, you just can’t pay attention to the … Continue reading →

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The two cultures

Posted on 2009-06-24 by Dan Rabin

Jon Stokes has an excellent description of the two contrasting philosophies of information management in his comparison of the Palm Pre and the iPhone. He names the two approaches “structure-and-browse” and “collect-and-query”. I feel like I’ve been groping for these … Continue reading →

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Chris Anderson: One size metadata doesn’t fit all

Posted on 2007-03-21 by Dan Rabin

Misfits of Metadata Chris Anderson of The Long Tail has an important post about how the metadata used in some music-listening applications doesn’t satisfy the listeners needs: [...] classical is a genre that the one-size-fits-all music aggregators such as iTunes … Continue reading →

Posted in Areas of application, Information Philosophy, Information usage patterns, Metadata, Musical | Leave a comment

OpenStreetMap constructs maps from GPS tracks!

Posted on 2007-02-21 by Dan Rabin

Sources and uses of digital information are in-scope for this blog, and a great example just showed up in my RSS reader today. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-like project to build a world map using contributed GPS tracks [OpenGeoData pointed me … Continue reading →

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Should metadata be stored in the file it describes? Jon Udell wonders…

Posted on 2007-02-20 by Dan Rabin

In “Who’s got the tag? Database truth versus file truth, part 3″, Jon Udell contrasts the Microsoft Vista and Mac OS X ways of associating metadata tags with image files: Vista tends to store them into the image files, and … Continue reading →

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Information Patterns: series introduction

Posted on 2007-02-02 by Dan Rabin

Every time a new data format spec hits my inbox, I get a little twinge of dread. Such documents are often enormous. They’re written in standardese (often badly). They’re usually written by committees. They go through a maze of twisty … Continue reading →

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Kent’s Data and Reality [book pointer]

Posted on 2006-12-28 by Dan Rabin

Let me kick off this blog by pointing to William Kent’s classic book Data and Reality. Lots of books will teach you how to process data with particular technologies, but Kent’s book goes deeper. He shows in chapter after chapter … Continue reading →

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