Stop generating metadata and access the full content! Many researchers advocate the use of metadata to help find or recommend content automatically. Metadata is certainly useful when aggregating content for human beings: I first read the titles of research papers before reading them. However, machines do better when they access at least some of content (Lin, 2009). Moreover, metadata is of little value in ranking answers (Hawking and Zobel, 2007). I think that researchers cling to metadata because that is how we have indexed books for so long. When I was a kid, full text searches in a library was unthinkable. Yet, there is no escape: everything is miscellaneous. Folksonomies … Continue reading Daniel Lemire