(2003-07-31) Tim Bray Metadata

Tim Bray [on](http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/29/Search Meta) Search Engine-s, Meta Data, and the Semantic Web. There is no cheap metadata... Here's the most obvious example: unless you've been throwing away your internal Web Server log files, you already know which are the most popular items on the Intranet. It would't be that hard to boil them down (occasionally, on a batch basis, this doesn't need to be real-time) and develop your own internal "PopRank" based on what gets downloaded the most... Once you've got some metadata, since it's expensive, you should take good care of it. This almost always means putting it in an RDBMS.

I sometimes think of Wiki Name-s as Worse Is Better Meta Data.