These systems may be used in corporate Intranets where efficiency is a recognised issue, but they are far less available on the wider internet. It is possible that the community represented at this conference, as it is concerned with higher quality networked information and retrieval, should develop its own Web indexing system, thereby providing an incentive for information providers to carry some metadata in their objects. Some computed metadata services are now appearing for objects, for example indexing the colour and texture of objects and covering some fairly large sets. It is possible to discover images containing a lot of yellow on a green background and to identify people, flowers and horses. The need to get deeper access to networked information resources is one of the main driving forces for metadata to describe them.
Some difficult problems remain to be explored.
There has not yet been sufficient progress on developing metadata about aggregated information, for example how to describe a database. Relationships among digital objects remain a very open question. There is also a need for work on uniform resource names. This account was drafted for this report by The Marc Fresko Consultancy. It is based on notes taken during the presentation.