Resource Profiles: This article by Stephen Downes is fairly intense reading...continuing his long-running exploration of the difficulties of extracting meaning from resources...see One Standard For All: Why We Don't Want It, Why We Don't Need It and Meaning Use and Metadata).
This article deals mainly with resource profiles ("a multi-faceted, wide ranging description of a resource")...proposing that, due to the subjective nature of object descriptions, multiple, distributed descriptions need to be employed. Don't let the fairly technical nature of the article deter you...it's a valuable discussion on the creation of a system intended to provide trustworthy descriptions of resources. Includes an extensive evaluation of metadata types.