Metadata as important as content

Many sites live and die by how well they're indexed by search engines. These sites also often rely on internal metadata such as tags in order to help people find what they're looking for. Add in the increasing relevance of the semantic web and the metadata within your site easily becomes as important as the content.

In a posting on CMSWatch, Analyst Tony Byrne muses about the people who are tasked with choosing and applying the terms that make the whole semantic engine work. Just as an editor checks over content for grammar, spelling, flow, accuracy and other such issues, Byrne refers to a term coming into popular use to describe those responsible for making sure that a site's metadata is consistent and useful: Metator.

According to Byrne, "Metators are really contextualizers. They look beyond the item of information itself to understand things like its relationships, impact, trajectory, findability, alternate formats and potential consumption profile."

If you have records managers, information managers, knowledge managers, or even librarians then you've got people who've been dealing with metadata for years. Now, this task has spread among web developers, content editors, writers and others.

Do you have any formal approach to handling your metadata? If it's not part of your workflow for at least one person to serve the metator function, it should be.

For more:
- read the CMSWatch article

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