> > A butterfly in the wild is not data.
>
> Why not ?
>
> -- or at least a *datum*.
The fact of the butterfly being in the wild is a datum. We could say, number_of_butterflies_in_wild = 1. That's your piece of data. The butterfly *itself* is not (at least, based on the commonly understood definition of "data").
And I would say the same thing in response to Simon Spero's assertion that documents == data. Documents aren't data. Documents *contain* data, but they are not themselves the data. A jar containing jellybeans is not itself a jellybean.
(If we were talking about "information" rather than data, I don't think we would be having this conversation. I don't know anybody that would say that a butterfly is information. It carries information, but the butterfly itself is a tangible thing; information is intangible.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data
With that said, I do think we use the term "metadata" differently than its literal interpretation ("data about data"). When a librarian talks about metadata, it's pretty much understood that they mean "data about documents," isn't it? Library metadata == most other professions' data.
Jason Thomale
Metadata Librarian
Texas Tech University Libraries
Received on Tue Jan 19 2010 - 10:03:34 EST