Is metadata data, or is data metadata, or are they different?

Dr. Winget posted this article on delicious, "Metadata vs Data: a wholly artificial distinction."

In this article, Terry Jones writes that it is wrong to distinguish between metadata and data. He opines that David Weinberger was right to state that all data is metadata. In saying this, what he means to get at is that people use metadata to search. In doing so, they don't necessarily only want to search by something that an authority has deemed metadata. Often, users wish to search full text in the same way they can search a title or an author.

He uses the example of the unix file system, which uses one command ("find") to search what has been pre-determined to be metadata, and another ("grep") to search inside what is deemed to be data. Although it is possible to combine these searches (a commenter on the blog provides the method), Jones' point is that separating the metadata and the data into two systems is problematic.

FluidDB, a cloud-based database, supposedly does not make this distinction, but holds all data together (all of it as metadata) in one searchable unit, made up of many pieces of data (or metadata). The author (and CEO) claims that this method is more robust because no data is more important than other data, meaning nothing will be lost or deleted, and anything can be added.

Functionally, I think it is a great idea to store metadata and data together, making either and both searchable. One of the advantages of digital storage is ease of search. It isn't really necessary to search the card catalog, get a reference to an item, and then go to it on the shelves. A federate search can directly pull on article from terms either in the title, in tags, or from the document.

However, I think conceptually, it could be very confusing to lump data together into an ever broadening category, or to lose the distinction between some metadata and an original item. For example, many collections add administrative (meta)data to items that should be kept distinct from what might be considered metadata but is also a part of the original item (title, date). For example, processing archivist is a piece of metadata that could be searched via a keyword search, but I would not want it to be confused as part of an original item.

Metadata is certainly data, and perhaps all data should be treated as metadata in search, but to me, strictly speaking, true metadata can only exist if the data to which it relates exists. A title with no article is just a phrase.