The world we interact with is full of objects – stuff we encounter: plants, trees, things of the ocean. We play with things, fix things, build things and engage with ideas. We also communicate with each other about such things.
When we use language, we are often just describing such things to each other. Description is metadata. More than just keywords and captions, metadata is an entire structure that supports how we relate to the world and how we can communicate about things to each other.
It’s the What, Where, When, Why, How of pretty much everything.
On the web, it’s incredibly helpful to communicate this information in such a way that it can be discovered or preserved accurately.
Keywords are a type of metadata that most people use regularly, but metadata can be a lot more.
Our research goes deeply into how to represent metadata as ‘structured data’ for the web.
We are the people who want the most obscure things in the world able to be found by describing them in the most precise ways possible.