People who have closed systems are publishing information, but it's not as valuable, because people are going to tend to go to those places where they can ask that one question and get broad exposure or broad answers coming back. Finally, metadata allow for the capability for intelligent postprocessing. People want the information coming back to be in a format that their desktop applications can actually work with and do analysis on. In framing the problem as it exists, the access strategy for the metadata is very important. Figure 19.1 shows the standard way of doing research where we deal with different Web sites and different places that publish information.
Users now have to go to one source, then the next, and the next.
This is a problem when you've got hundreds of places that are publishing their information. It's a problem because it takes a lot more time to do things. It's also a problem because you have to collate all the information that is coming back, and everybody is formatting it differently. Metadata resolve this because they separate format from content. They want the information collated on the way back, and they want it similarly formatted.