Making meta data work

Following the successful launch of the ‘Generations’ research we produced for Travolution magazine, my knowledge of the travel industry has expanded considerably. One of the hot topics is ‘meta search’, as seen on sites like kayak.com and Travel Supermarket, which allow customers to search across a number of suppliers.

While this works well in industries where you can compare like with like (e.g. white goods, flights), the idea falls over when you move onto more complex products, unless you’re prepared to narrow your search down to one field, such as price or destination if we use travel as an example.

Meta data is data that explains what other data is. In other industries, meta data has been used to describe incredibly complex concepts. Using STEP (the Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data), for example, it’s possible to define a complete nuclear submarine from an XML file smaller than this newsletter.

How can meta data help our businesses? Well, those of you that take search engine optimisation seriously will already have defined meta tags to feed search engines the keywords that are most important in your pages, and the titles that can be used in search listings. However, you can take it much further. If you can define the finer aspects of your product or service, you can make those machine-readable too.

If you’re in the travel industry, for example, you could use meta data to describe the view, or local attractions. That could make it possible for people to search according to the kinds of places they like to visit, rather than choosing a place first and then narrowing their choice by price. You could even make search engines that learn someone’s preferences so they can suggest suitable breaks.

This might all be some way off, but it would transform how we use the internet. At the moment, the internet tells us what we ask it. Wouldn’t it be nice if it knew the answers to questions we didn’t know we wanted to ask; if it could do some of the thinking for us and make recommendations rather than just expose our options.