![]() In an article in the 5 September 1988 issue of the New Republic, Noam Cohen discussed meta and recorded an accurate prediction as to how it would be used in the future: Īnd in the 1980s, the self-referential sense generalized and came into its own. This second data element we might term a “metadata element.” Examples of such metadata elements are: an identifier, a domain ‘prescriptor’. Bagley wrote in his Extension of Programming Language Concepts:Ī second data element represents data “about” the first data element. Of particular note is the coining of metadata, referring to information about the data, such as the date a file was last updated. The world of computing picked up the prefix meta- in the late 1960s. Universality of application is only one meta-criterion for the choice of criteria. For instance, in his 1953 book Linguistic Form, Charles E. In the twentieth century, the disciplines of logic and linguistics started using meta- to refer to underlying principles. Therefore, the original sense of metaphysics was “after physics.” But given the subject matter, the title was later interpreted as referring to a higher order, to things that were beyond the physical world, and that is the sense of the term in English.īut in recent usage, meta has come to denote things that are self-referential. The book was called Metaphysics because it was believed that Aristotle thought the proper order of instruction should be physics first and ontology second. The title is not Aristotle’s but was assigned the work in the sixth century CE. This sense arises out of misreading of the title of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a work of ontological philosophy that contemplates such concepts as existence, causation, form, and matter. ![]() In English, meta- is often used in the sense of beyond, at a higher level. ![]() The original sense, as it was used in Mycenaean Greek, was probably “together with,” but in later use, the Greek prefix was also used to express sharing, common action, and change in place, order, or condition. The Greek combining form is from the same Indo-European root as the English mid. The English prefix and word meta is from the Greek μετα.
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