Kristjan Jansen Interaction designer and social activist. Contact: kika at trip.ee

It has been in the news already, but unfortunately I missed the link.

eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language XFML is an open XML format for publishing and connecting faceted metadata between websites.

This can be the missing link to create the distributed taxonomy what has been discussed in IASlash and [drupal-devel] list.

Here's some shared experiences I've gained when creating my Drupal site and using its meta system. Actually, its kinda a second installment of series – first part was posted to Drupal-devel mailing list

Here's what I've done:

Jeff Barr in Syndic8 list: This is a must-read for all of those talking about categories, even if the site is very slow to respond: Taxonomies Put Content in Context. Yes, its slow. Cached copy here.

Found an exellent discussion about faceted classification – basically the same metadata-based classification we try to implement in Drupal:
Innovation in Classification:

Most folks, when thinking about organizing objects or information, immediately think of a hierarchical, or taxonomic, organization; a top-down structure, where you start with a number of broad categories that get ever more detailed, until you arrive at the object. /…/
Faceted classification, on the other hand, is a bottom-up scheme. Here, each object is tagged with a certain set of attributes and values (these are the facets), and the organization of these objects emerges from this classification, and how a user chooses to access them. Toys, for example, lend themselves to a faceted classification, with the facets being things like, “Suitable Age,” “Price,” “Subject Type,” “Brand,” and even “Character”

No more words, gonna dig deep into it and check all those valuable links they provide.
Another pointer about subject: Next Generation Web Search: Setting Our Sites

Found an interesting study (PDF) how to use metadata to create flexible searching / navigation system.

Authors have created a working example in cuisine site Epicurious. Basically, the tag all their receipes using metatag collectons Main Ingredient, Preparation Method, Cuisine, Season/Occasion, Special Considerations and Course/Dish (To simplify things they keep collections flat – that means no hierarchy)
They have built 3 searching interfaces based on metatags:

• Standard search
• Advanced search with ability to check/uncheck tags
• Hybrid search/browse interface (most interesting IHMO)

According to usability study, users found their way quite easily with such system. The study also gives good ideas to develop metatag-based navigation/searching further (note the Figure 9 in PDF).

Here's another study about the subject: Optimizing Search by Showing Results In Context.

XFML 1.0 spec was released today. XFML is a XML language for sharing faceted metadata and content indexing. In other words – it describes your site topics/sections in XML and allows linking your site topics to somebody else's site topics. It also can describe what content item (story, blog, picture) is assigned to what topic/section. To learn more, visit xfml.org. See also my previous blog entry about the subject.

Drupal already supports a new format, a XFML.module can be found on contributions repository. There are already some early adopters of the module such as IASlash.

On every New York Times article page there's a small box Times News Tracker (for example here)

Flash demo, News Tracker Tour tells your how it works.

It would be great if someone implements the idea in Drupal – using taxonomy (topics) and extendable user accounts (personal alerts).

Another late-night idea: assigning metatags to online conversations, more specific – to chat logs.

How many valuable information will be lost, when people chatting online – a good tip for travelling, a valuable URL, anything.

Yep, there are client-side solutions to this – a IM logs, URL collectors etc. But I was thinking to do it server-side.

Most chat servers can be configured to store their chat logs in database (Drupal chatbox, a IRC bots etc. All we have to do is apply a filter to a chatlog to find relevant metatags. The filter could be the same what we planning to use on automatic node tagging.

Manual alternative to this is a classic IRC topic command, but this time the topic will be related to terms in taxonomy.

An example is my travel site Trip.ee where I have set up an IRC client. Most of the topics people speak about are gegraphical locations (“Let's do West Afica”) or travel style (“wanna work in Spain”). Exactly the terms I have defined in meta.module – Afica > West Africa and Travel styles > Work abroad

Found some links from syndication list about expressing image metadata with RDF:

http://www.w3.org/TR/photo-rdf/ http://jigsaw.w3.org/rdfpic

Ain't that the same thing Adobe wants to accomplish with XMP?

Doug Kaye, who's writing a book about weblogs in organizatons is rather pessimistic about metadata:

Still, he admits that metadata can be useful in certain circumstances:

This is definitely the case for my travel site. ;)Dody Gunawinata on the other hand states in K-Log mailing list:

He also offers a practical solution:

Note that I had to replace the >‘s with []’s.