Information Annotation

Just spent some time catching up on (well, at least made a dent) on my backlog of magazines. A Queue mag had a series of articles on computer languages. New languages they said, come about for a couple of reasons, and I paraphrase:

1) Better performance (generally order of magnitude in order to displace an old one)
2) Better abstraction/programmer efficiency
3) New application/usage (web)
4) Specialized usage (parallel)

There are also incremental improvements that have been and continue to be made on existing languages as we learn how to do things better.

Anyway, this set of articles got me to thinking about the language of information and how we handle, manipulate and specify information. I'm not really familiar with this area, but what are the available languages for information specification? I can think of several, loosely:

1) Databases - in these the meta information is stored implicitly and explicitly in the database system itself
2) HTML - information embedded in structure, some implicit information can be retrieved
3) SGML/XML - more information stored in the markup including some semantics
4) RDF et al. - additional relationships and semantic information included with the information itself

I'm sure I'm missing a lot so I'll keep digging. Nonetheless, these all seem woefully inadequate and insufficient to enable real reuse of information. There are so many attributes of the information that are perhaps orthogonal to the actual information and yet are required to truly scale and make a usable infostructure.

Is a new language of information needed? Or can we use existing systems to facilitate these needs? Things like access, ownership, authorship, timeliness, expiration, accuracy, etc. It seems that we need additional mechanisms to create and maintain this meta information beyond what currently exists.

Kipp




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