Metadata v. Metacrap: Technology Standards in the Poverty Law Community
On my way to work yesterday I was listening to a fan reading of essays from Cory Doctrow's Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future, and was reminded of his great essay, "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia." I was also reminded of the good work that our community does on standards, and that there are some great projects and resources that you may not be aware of. (Confession: At one time I coordinated the Legal Services XML Group with folks from LSNTAP, LSC, and ILAO and really enjoyed thinking about this stuff.)
- What is XML and Why Does it Matter? - This is a good introduction to XML for the poverty law community. A nice technical supplement to this is the Wikipedia entry on XML.
- The Power of XML for Poverty Law - Examples of technology projects in the poverty law community that have used LSXML standards to share information between systems (i.e. case management, statewide websites, and intake).
- National Subject Matter Index (NSMI) - The NSMI is a taxonomy of poverty law topics used to standardized the indexing of data. It is now updated using the National Subject Matter Index Tool.
- The XML Primer for Techies - A resource on the more technical aspects of XML, DTDs, and XSL.
If that's not enough to keep you busy, I would also recommend reading Clay Shirky's Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags, which considers some of the challenges of classification by categories and hierarchies. -M
