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June 6, 2005

Metadata Quality

Does everyone know how important metadata is to the success of their business model? For example, I recently jumped on a web site that defines its business model as a single point of contact to look up business information. Sounds like a great business plan, surely this company would understand the importance of quality metadata. I jumped on the site a placed a search for a local church with under the denomination of X. The search result returned 16 churches. The average distance from my home was 22 miles with the longest distance was 65 miles. The closest was 6 miles but where in the result was this close church? At the top, right? Nope, this church was 16 of 16 and located at the bottom of the list. Now for a quality check, I know that there are 4 churches under X denomination. Maybe they were not in the database I was searching which would excuse the poor results. No again, I searched on the other three churches by name and all three were located in the database. The question remains if we have a metadata issue, location calculation error or a miss-classification issue.

Posted by Todd at June 6, 2005 1:03 PM