AS DATA become more abundant, the main problem is no longer finding the information as such but laying one’s hands on the relevant bits easily and quickly. What is needed is information about information. Librarians and computer scientists call it metadata.
Information management has a long history. In Assyria around three millennia ago clay tablets had small clay labels attached to them to make them easier to tell apart when they were filed in baskets or on shelves. The idea survived into the 20th century in the shape of the little catalogue cards librarians used to note down a book’s title, author, subject and so on before the records were moved onto computers. The actual books constituted the data, the catalogue cards the metadata. Other examples include package labels to the 5 billion bar codes that are scanned throughout the world every day.
These days metadata are undergoing a virtual renaissance. In order to be useful, the cornucopia of information provided by the internet has to be organised. That is what Google does so well. The raw material for its search engines comes free: web pages on the public internet. Where it adds value (and creates metadata) is by structuring the information, ranking it in order of its relevance to the query.
