If they are not, it's difficult. This brings up the issue of metadata standards. Standards provide a framework so that software can access information from numerous organizations and applications. In addition, one query accesses many different data sources. This opens up the possibility of querying across different kinds of information from different disciplines, which is pretty significant.
Results are also of high quality due to the common semantics.
So title names are consistent across multiple disciplines. It now becomes possible with metadata to query a query and within seconds to get an answer, whereas in the past you would have to go and drill into all of these different disciplines. The idea of mining and discovery becomes much easier than it has been in the past. The other thing to keep in mind with regard to metadata standards is that each community has special needs. As a result, there are always going to be different standards.