An Investigation into Sharing Metadata: "I'm not thinking what you are thinking"

A small collection of metadata concepts has been jointly negotiated among a group of specialists to be relevant for classifying data used in their field. A series of comparisons are made to test levels of agreement between individuals when these concepts are used to tag data items. Inter-coder agreement measures are presented for a range of data sets and individuals with varying relationships to the data sets. The implications of the results for the use of metadata as a supporting mechanism for knowledge sharing are discussed.