CIRCA:Metadata

From CIRCA

Revision as of 15:11, 22 November 2012

History

The term "Metadata" was first created by Philip Bagley in 1968, in his book Extension of programming language concepts. Since then the fields of information management, information technology, information science, librarianship and GIS have widely adopted this term.

What is Metadata?

To be brief and simple, metadata is "data about data", defined by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and NCSA (National Center of Supercomputing Applications). To be precisely, metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise make it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource.

Metadata has been applied in many fields, and each of which has a unique definition of metadata. So there isn't an agreed definition that describes all kinds of metadata used in every field.

card cataloge of a book

Here's an example of simple metadata, a card cataloging of a book in past days. There are author, title, subtitle, publisher, date of publication, place of publication, etc. All data about a book, which is also data.

Now we mostly focus on metadata in digital format and web resources.

Types

There are three basic types of metadata, sorted by NISO (National Information Standards Organization).

• Structure Metadata - data about containers of data

 Structure metadata shows how compound objects are put together.     e.g. How pages are ordered to form chapters.
 Structure metadata often means the inner order, structure, schema of data.