DQ-View: MetaData makes BettahMusic

Data Quality (DQ) View is an OCDQ regular segment. Each DQ-View is a brief video discussion of a data quality key concept.

If you are having trouble viewing this video, then you can watch it on Vimeo by clicking on this link: DQ-View on Vimeo

You can also watch a regularly updated page of my videos by clicking on this link: OCDQ Videos

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Comments

[Jen Besser]

As always, Jim, thanks for making data management topics relevant and fun. I've been using the library card catalog analogy to explain metadata, but that is a dated analogy. Thanks for supplying a more up to date, everyday analogy.

[Crysta Anderson]

Really nice example of real-world metadata application. By this logic, Pandora only exists because of the available metadata.

[Jim Harris]

Thanks for your comments, Jen and Crysta.

@Jen — Yes, I too have used a library card catalog analogy in the past, as well as a music analogy based on albums and album covers, back when albums were compact disks or vinyl records that you could use for a show-and-tell presentation in real life. I came up with the iTunes analogy after being chided by a much younger member of my extended family who was confused why there were no songs in my iTunes library — and even more confused by my attempted explanation of music that didn’t come from the Internet :-)

@Crysta — Pandora (which I am listening to as I type this) is another fascinating example since metadata is needed in order for Pandora to create radio stations for you by artist, track, or composer, as well as the great metadata that they have for lyrics (my favorite feature), artist biographies, and similar artists.

Pandora’s Music Genome Project is a great example of the power of combining metadata and data, which uses almost 400 song attributes and a complex data mining algorithm to organize them, which also discovers other songs and artists similar to the ones you indicate that you like (data quality geeks like me would call this a data matching user feedback process).