Trouble ahead: Propositional attitudes and metadata
Allen H. Renear, Yunseon Choi · Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2005
Abstract We argue that the natural pressure to develop increasingly expressive metadata systems will soon present new and very difficult problems to the metadata community. In particular we draw attention to propositional attitudes, which will be important for a wide variety of metadata applications, including representations of trust in ecommerce, and representations of provenance, expert assessments, and social context in the management of cultural objects. However propositional attitudes are extremely difficult to represent in a way that supports automated inferencing. Both the web and the museum informatics community have recognized this problem and stipulate limitations to their systems. But eventually this problem will require more functional resolution. We believe that intentionality‐related problems, like the representation of propositional attitudes will soon be more important to metadata and knowledge representation research than traditional modeling problems, such as the expressiveness vs. efficiency tradeoff.