Hello Jem :);
I couldn’t actually gain the information from the Article about what ‘Metadata’ Actually ‘is’;
So I ‘Hope’ that this rather Technical Information may be of some Assistance 🙂
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts (types). Although the expression “data about data” is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at design time the application contains no data. In this case the correct description would be “data about the containers of data”. Descriptive metadata, on the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the data content. In this case, a useful description (resulting in a disambiguating neologism) would be “data about data contents” or “content about content” thus metacontent. Descriptive, Guide and the National Information Standards Organization concept of administrative metadata are all subtypes of metacontent.
Metadata (metacontent) is traditionally found in the card catalogs of libraries. As information has becoming increasingly digital, metadata is also used to describe digital data using metadata standards specific to a particular discipline. By describing the contents and context of data files, the quality of the original data/files is greatly increased. For example, a webpage may include metadata specifying what language it’s written in, what tools were used to create it, and where to go for more on the subject, allowing browsers to automatically improve the experience of users.
Metadata (metacontent) is defined as data providing information about one or more aspects of the data, such as:
- Means of creation of the data
- Purpose of the data
- Time and date of creation
- Creator or author of data
- Placement on a computer network where the data was created
- Standards used
- The basic information of a piece of music
For example, a digital image may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the color depth, the image resolution, when the image was created, and other data. A text document’s metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is, when the document was written, and a short summary of the document.
Metadata is data. As such, metadata can be stored and managed in a database, often called a registry or repository. However, it is impossible to identify metadata just by looking at it because a user would not know when data is metadata or just data.
