Metadata: It's Not Just for Geospatial Folks

There's an interesting interview on CreativeCow.net about metadata in the film industry. It centers on the need of modern filmmakers to know a great deal about how the film they are editing was exposed and the challenges of maintaining all that metadata:

For example, script supervisors for the most part take a paper copy of the script, and note vast quantities of metadata in real time just by watching the movie being filmed: script changes, which actors are in each shot, and so on. And they notate that using lines and squiggles and arrows and notes all over the typed script, with hand written notes to elaborate. They accumulate vast quantities of paper that people have to keep in notebooks.

The interview is a discussion between film-maker Dave Stump and writer Gary Adcock about the many different processes and technologies of the film industry and the interrelated metadata they require.

There's a parallel here, I think, with some of the more complex geospatial applications. The more parts that you bring together, the more creative and informative you can be. But such complexity also demands more information about those parts.

You can get the job done without good metadata and metadata management, but it is much harder, and much more risky.