This is great stuff. It sounds like there is a real distinction to be made between the data central to the apis and the user-defined properties. Also, as time and compatibility allow, we should probably change what we were calling metadata to be called properties or somesuch.
"Jay Pipes" <jaypi...@gmail.com> said: > On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 10:45 PM, Jay Pipes <jaypi...@gmail.com> wrote: >> for those of a like-minded curiosity about these things. From the >> wikipedia article on this same subject: >> >> "The term Metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two >> fundamentally different concepts (Types). Although a trite expression >> "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same >> way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data >> structures, cannot be about data, because at design time the >> application contains no data. In this case the correct description >> would be "data about the containers of data". Descriptive metadata on >> the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the >> data content. In this case, a useful description (resulting in a >> disambiguating neologism) would be "data about data contents" or >> "content about content" thus Metacontent. Descriptive, Guide and the >> NISO concept of Administrative metadata are all subtypes of >> metacontent." > > And for those wondering why the Glance project uses the term > "metadata" to describe data about the image, we, too, have a similar > terminology problem: > > We delineate between the image *data*, which is the raw image file > itself, and image *metadata*, which is really data about the image > (like disk format, status, etc). To make matters worse, we have the > concept of image *properties* which are free-form key/value pairs > attached to the image. > > So, neither Glance nor Nova uses the term *metadata* properly, for > what it's worth :) > > -jay > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~openstack > Post to : openstack@lists.launchpad.net > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~openstack > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp > _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~openstack Post to : openstack@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~openstack More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
