Wave if you love metadata

Last month I had dinner with some friends. One of them, half way through the meal, declared his animosity for metadata. I was stunned. Who hates metadata? He’s a scientist. Does this explain it? I don’t know. His feeling was that, what with free text searching, metadata is no longer necessary. And besides, he can’t be bothered filling in the elements required by what I took to be his company’s records management attempt to manage the electronic records he creates. Clearly, he was thinking in a narrow arena. The whole conversation was more than mildly upsetting.