8viii25
This really needs an update, to incorporate an array of links and thoughts about the lexeme meta, including these:
- META-LEVEL KNOWLEDGE: OVERVIEW AND APPLICATIONS Randall Davis and Bruce C. Buchanan
- Meta (prefix) Wikipedia
...Douglas Hofstadter, in his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach (and in the 1985 sequel, Metamagical Themas), popularized this meaning of the term. The book, which deals with self-reference and strange loops, and touches on Quine and his work, was influential in many computer-related subcultures and may be responsible for the popularity of the prefix, for its use as a solo term, and for the many recent coinages which use it.[11] Hofstadter uses meta as a stand-alone word, as an adjective, and as a directional preposition ("going meta," a term he coins for the old rhetorical trick of taking a debate or analysis to another level of abstraction, as when somebody says "This debate isn't going anywhere"). This book may also be responsible for the association of "meta" with strange loops, as opposed to just abstraction. According to Hofstadter, it is about self-reference, which means a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes it as "showing or suggesting an explicit awareness of itself or oneself as a member of its category: cleverly self-referential".[12] The sentence "This sentence contains thirty-six letters," and the sentence which embeds it, are examples of "metasentences" referencing themselves in this way. As maintained in the book G¨del, Escher, Bach, a strange loop is given if different logical statements or theories are put together in contradiction, thus distorting the meaning and generating logical paradoxes. One example is the liar paradox, a paradox in philosophy or logic that arises when a sentence claims its own falsehood (or untruth); for instance: "This sentence is not true." Until the beginning of the 20th century, this kind of paradox was a considerable problem for a philosophical theory of truth. Alfred Tarski solved this difficulty by proving that such paradoxes do not exist with a consistent separation of object language and metalanguage.[13] "For every formalized language, a formally correct and factually applicable definition of the true statement can be constructed in the metalanguage with the sole help of expressions of a general-logical character, expressions of the language itself and of terms from the morphology of the language, but on the condition that the metalanguage is of a higher order than the language that is the subject of the investigation."[14]...In 1988, the journalist Noam Cohen wrote an article for The New Republic titled "Meta-Musings," in which he contemplated the increasing frequency of meta- as a prefix. Cohen quoted David Justice, at the time Merriam-Webster's editor in charge of pronunciation and etymology, who predicted that meta could follow retro as a prefix that developed its own meaning as a standalone word, offering the example, "Wow, this sentence is so meta."
Cohen 1988 (New Republic)
- What's the Meta? NY Times (2005)
- That's So Meta: From Prefix to Adjective Merriam-Webster
- The pleasures of recursive acronymy Language Log
- Doing Meta: from meta-language to meta-clippy Language Log
- Quote query Language Log
(the material below is left over from the 1999- pass at 'metadata' and is of historical interest only)
- Metadata Documentation from Princeton
- Meta-Information, The Network of the Future and Intellectual Property Protection (Kenneth L. Phillips)
- about Mind Maps
- Information Systems Meta-list (pretty computer-specific, but a nice effort to pull together a lot of stuff)
- Gödel, Escher, Bach (seems pretty meta to me...)
28 Nov 1999
A specific use for this category: figuring out how we should deal with GIS metadata. I did a quick search via AltaVista and (as usual) found some things I should have known about..., some of which I had encountered a while ago but lost in the complexities of filespace:...just a beginning.
- Global Information Locator Service (GILS)
- Montana State Library GIS Data Dictionary
- Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
- Geographic Data Library: Viewable samples and metadata (California)
- Alexandria Digital Library Project
- Arts and Humanities Data Service: Digital Preservation --a guide to web resources (UK)
- Notes on Metadata and the Web
- Data Sources on the Internet from UVa
- U.S. State and Local GIS Data Resources from UC Berkeley
- VCGI Metadata Resources (Vermont Regional Planning Commissions)
- Metadata Tools for Geospatial Data (Wisconsin)
- Metadata Primer -- A "How To" Guide on Metadata Implementation, by David Hart and Hugh Phillips
- NSF Digital Library projects
- Frequently-asked questions on FGDC metadata (Peter Schweitzer)
29 Nov
the GIS metadata problem: pieces of a solution to how to create and access metadata via ArcView13 Dec
Keith Belton of SOLINET told me about Florida Data Directoy