Mare Nostrum

The metadata-driven view

Mike Straus, product manager extraordinaire, just published his new project (code sample plus documentation) about a metadata-driven view of content in our system. Why is this interesting?

• It exposes the metadata entered for document classes (our term for categories) in a way that's immediately useful. Anyone looking for a particular piece of content, or interested in what's available generally, can benefit from this view.
• It provides a reason for entering the metadata in the first place. If you don't enter the metadata, your work won't appear in this view. If you do a lousy job of entering it
• Customers and partners have already built views like this one. For example, Time Warner built a much more sophisticated version of this view, but the point is essentially the same: let people browse by the metadata.
• The folder structure is increasingly less important than other views on the content. Everyone knows how to navigate files and folders, but this view of the content doesn't fulfill everyone's needs. Looking at a folder full of documents, I don't know who is their intended audience, what there topics might be (other than what the file name suggests), and whether they're really in good enough shape to use. To answer these questions, you need something like the metadata-driven view.
• Customer use cases often demand a metadata-driven view. That's effectively what the institutional repository solution provides, a metadata-driven way of browsing and searching library content. You can take Mike's code as a starting point for exploring the third option discussed in the institutional repository white paper (building this view of our system, instead of integrating us with a separate institutional repository application).
• We're building metadata-driven views for future versions of our product. We're not necessarily building something that functions in exactly the same way that Mike's project does, but there are plenty of other ways to use metadata (and other types of metadata). For example, you might use a metadata-filtering view, in which you click particular standard or custom metadata to narrow the list of files and folders that fit that profile. (Think of the way iTunes lets you filter music by genre, artist, etc.).

Take a look at Mike's project, and let us know what you think.