Various buzz-o-meter indices are generally based, in fact, on how long a given term maintains its aura of magic, not on the inherent worth of the concept(s) represented by the term.

Cheers,

Alan

@Jerry Leichter and metadata.
No, translating a document into a different language creates a new document. It cannot be metadata. That’s just WRONG.

“then I need to store it elsewhere and keep track of the association between the two texts using some other mechanism, which will play the say role as metadata. ”

That’s what metadata is for. It can be structured to form bonds and relationships. In this instance I would have metadata that just said that this is a “derivative” of another document. There would be a tag also saying which language it’s in. That’s it, simple.

Remember that the translated work may end up having revisions in its own right. If you were to store the translated works in the metadata then you will be constantly updating metadata. That’s very very broken. Would you then have to have different revision of the metadata? How do you cope with that? That’s even more perverted than people that put all the content in XML in attributes instead of creating new sub elements.

@Cloud
As much as I believe in the use of cloud storage and often an advocate, the term makes my ears bleed. But then, the question is, what would you call it? (I do agree calling a product by the fashion of the day is silly).

@Extended metadata=EMOMB
How about EMOMB. Like any good modern acronym I will need to describe how to pronounce it. More importantly it stands for “Extended Metadata Overused Marketing Buzzword”.

I don’t think we can find a good name for this yet as its not been defined. Maybe this is where XAM will save us. Until then I would resist any new term as it will end up being marketing gibberish with every vendor citing how they have “EMOMB driven architecture”, “EMOMB platform” and “EMOMB value added solutions”. We wouldn’t have moved a step forward and would be begging for the return of “Clouds”.

Fab

Metadata is data ABOUT the data and a translation is a version OF the data. Now a metadata format that provided reference to the translation, which could be XML in XAM or stored in a content management system database would be cool.

Note that even by your book analogy the translation will be a different volume in the library.

Now, to me, the French was the received data, the English the metadata. Maybe to someone else it’s the other way around. Maybe I work in Canada and the document is something that has both French and English versions that, by law, are considered to have equal validity. Does it then make sense to add that “meta” prefix to one but not the other?

Forget metadata. What you want is rich data. Data with annotations, translations, environment information, history – all kinds of things. Books have footnotes and endnotes and appendices. Metadata, or just part of the book?

I could be just as happy with an archiving software/data mover that stored the extended metadata and index in a database as a XAM like extended file system with metadata that the archiving/data mover software had to populate.