Data and Reality

Written in 1978 about databases, and still the best book about metadata anybody has managed. Its subject is the gap between a record and the thing the record claims to be — which is the gap every page type here lives in.

Where it bit

A track on the Festival page has an artist. So does the ID3 tag in the file it came from. Two fields for one fact is two fields that will eventually disagree, and the one a renderer reads will be the stale one. The import path now writes exactly one canonical key and the editor chip corrects that, rather than adding a second opinion beside it.

Kent would have predicted the bug from the schema alone.