RDF Made Easy:

Divine Metadata for the Web

People who have thought about these problems, including many librarians and webmasters, generally agree that the Web urgently needs metadata. What would it look like? If the Web had an all-powerful Grand Organizing Directorate (at www.GOD.org), it would think up a set of lookup fields such as Author, Title, Date, Subject, and so on. The Directorate, being, after all, GOD, would simply decree that all Web pages start using this divine Metadata, and that would be that. Of course there would be some details such as how the Web sites ought to package up and interchange the metadata, and we all know that the Devil is in the details, but GOD can lick the Devil any day.

In fact, there is no www.GOD.org. For this reason, there is no chance that everyone will agree to start using the same metadata facilities. If libraries, which have existed for hundreds of years, can't agree on a single standard, there's not much chance that the Web will.

Does this mean that there is no chance for metadata? That everyone is going to have to build their own lookup keys and values and software, and that we're going to be stuck using dumb, brute force robots forever?
No. As we observed with our three search scenarios, metadata operations have an awful lot in common, even when the metadata is different. RDF is an effort to identify these common threads and provide a way for Web architects to use them to provide useful Web metadata without divine intervention.