And W3C is working on XML, the extensible markup language , which should be some sort of general-purpose language for denoting assertions. Two other big metadata pushes are coming from librarians and data-retrieval companies, who want to use metadata to describe things like the author and title of a document, as well as the license agreement under which the document is being made available. In the meantime, I'm probably better off searching for that new Kate Bush album myself. Talk back to Simson Garfinkel in his column's Threads . Illustration by Dave Plunkert Join the HotWired Network, it's free .
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