Guardian angels as a way to create associative metadata is explored in a recent white paper by Mike Alvarado and Tom Coughlin. Guardian Angels are objective observers that watch how content is used by an individual or organization to create associative metadata. In addition these guardian angels can work together on-line through an “Invisible College” to anonymously share allowed information to the mutual benefit of the sharing parties. By this means even more broad associative metadata can be generated through collaborative means. In this professional alert we discuss how IT can implement these concepts in the enterprise environment.
First, how do we make Guardian Angels? We already employ many ways to create and use metadata in the course of our personal and working lives. Ordinary metadata covers basic information about a thing or event. Guardian Angels must rise above this mundane basic metadata to create and manage textual, semantic, and contextual metadata. They must help us find associations and gather our reactions and feelings about content or at least to get a good model of what we tend to do with one sort of content or another. To make this possible we need to broaden the current types of metadata standards to include associative metadata that may be created continuously while data is used. These standards must allow for non-static types of metadata that can be generated by the actions of an individual or work group. Furthermore they must allow for broader metadata associations to be made between other individuals or work groups through the Internet — the Invisible College. These standards must also include methods of encrypting and protecting this higher-level metadata from unauthorized access.
How do we create an Invisible College where these representative Guardian Angels can collaborate to share metadata and create new associative metadata while protecting the privacy of their individual or group clients? One idea of how this can be done is using Hadoop. Hadoop is Java software that supports data-intensive distributed applications that can comprise thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. We need to explore how we can build an anonymous collaborative metadata social environment where metadata associations between individuals or work groups can be created.
If we can create these Guardian Angels and the Invisible College where they can work together to create higher level associative metadata we will provide a whole new tool for social networking and for the creation of searchable and usable content. In addition we will create new tools for efficient asset use and new bridges between individuals, corporations and cultures.
Action Item: Organizations must begin to build associative metadata agents to help enterprises better manage cloud initiatives. Associative metadata models can enable both value creation and risk reduction which when balanced can support new business models that are more flexible, global, facile, and faster to market.
Footnotes: Read the White Paper