Rikcat Industries

I haven’t seen much written on the subject of metadata, especially as it relates to information architecture and designing interactions with users. This post describes metadata and shows real world examples of advanced uses of metadata. Metadata is at the core of what makes mashups, a Web 2.0 staple, so popular.

Wikipedia describes metadata as data about data. So, for example, you might have this post’s content as the main data but the date published, date edited, author, category, tags, etc. would all be its metadata. It’s supporting data that enables enrichment of navigation for users or intersections with other data to provide more related information.

It’s extremely important for those who dabble in information architecture, interaction design or web design to understand the importance of using metadata to build an effective modern web application.

Metadata as Navigation

Navigation is the more common usage of metadata. This post has supporting navigation to related posts by category, tags, and its publish date. All of these navigation points are associated by their metadata.

I think it’s important as a designer to have access and to look at feeds or database tables when developing the user interface. It enables them to find creative uses for metadata that can complement the interaction. I’ve worked at places were this is not a common practice and always thought it was odd.

Early this year I redesigned rikcat.com and I used my Delicious links feed as the main content area for my links section. I noticed the feed had the tags from my posts. So I decided to provide them to users as links back to the corresponding Delicious tag to enrich the user experience. If I never looked inside the data feed, I would have never had the idea to use them in the user interface.

Metadata for Data Intersection & Mashups

Simple forms of data intersection could be the use of tags on a real estate blog. Say all of your authors tagged their posts with a zipcode relating to the content. Well, you could aggregate all of those zipcodes and geocode the posts. Then use the Google Map API to visualize the related posts on a map to create new entry points to the content.

Yahoo Pipes is a mashup tool that takes multiple sets of data and intersects them on their metadata. It also provides some tools to do content analysis and outputs the results to a feed. You can create and enrich the data to enable new interfaces into content.

Data Visualization

A more advanced example of leveraging metadata is digg.com’s Digg Labs. Via flash applications Digg Labs uses the choices their users are constantly making to create a steady flow of metadata, giving the applications a feeling of activity. Users will generate more metadata than your admin users or, in Digg’s case, its story submitter will, so figuring out how to provoke and strengthen users interaction will help enable more visualization.

ESPN.com Sportsnation Polls use IP look-ups to capture the state where poll votes are cast. Then it uses that metadata to provide a visual map of where votes were cast. The user can also hover over a state and see results from just that state. A great use of the collected metadata.

Conclusion

When designing a site, do you look at the site’s metadata? Do you look at the database field or xml feeds for navigation and content ideas?