Here are two points that I had to remove from my piece in the Sunday Boston Globe due to space constraints. People have sent me email about both.

First, books are way complex. What is Hamlet? Any book of the play? The Signet edition? A reprint of the Signet edition? The Signet edition with a new preface? With errata corrected? The Signet large print edition? The German translation? The original manuscript? Hamlet in the one-volume Collected Works? This matters because when you’re looking for a copy of Hamlet, you’re acting as if that were unambiguous when in fact there are various forms of the book that will or will not satisfy you. This is the type of complexity that drives people to create ontologies. Short of that, xISBN tries to cluster books in reasonable ways. . And there’s a standard (I can’t lay my hands on it now — FRBR? — I’m slightly on the road) that lays out the various levels of abstraction.

Second, the original version of my article made the case — way too quickly — that contents are now metadata: E.g., you look up a phrase at Google Print to find out the name of the book. In fact, the only difference between metadata and data now seems to be that data is what you’re looking for and metadata is what you use to find it. (I’ve written about this before.) [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous metadata taxonomy ontology]

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