An attempt to answer the question "What does 'data about data' mean?"

1. Metadata for beginners
By Kaile Glick
kaile.glick@usm.edu
LIS457
Dr. Cunningham
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick

2. Introduction
Teachers always told me that you can’t use the
word your trying to define in the definition.
For example, telling someone who has never
heard of basketball that a basketball is a “ball”
that goes in a “basket”, may not be very
helpful….
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick

3. … so what is metadata?
Its data about data!
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick

4. OK, lets try this again…
Metadata is a new word based on an old concept.
Any summary of the contents of a library or archive,
like a card catalog, contains metadata.
-Jeff Good
http://www.language-archives.org/documents/gentle-intro.html
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick

5. For example:
A citation like the one below, is information
about a book--that is, data about data.
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick
Asimov, I. The foundation trilogy: Three classics
of science fiction. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1963
http://www.language-archives.org/documents/gentle-
intro.html
…A book citation is a fairly well-known
kind of metadata, but the general idea of
``data about data'' is far more inclusive.

6. In fact
the general idea of metadata is SO inclusive
it can be nearly impossible to
understand!
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick

7. As with many newfangled technologies,
sometimes the easiest explanations come from
science fiction
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick

8. The protagonist of Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation Trilogy is a mathematician
named Hari Seldon.
Several thousand years in the future,
seldon develops a branch of
mathematics known as
“Psychohistory”…
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick

9. Using massive data sets collected and
computed by the galactic empire,
Seldon discovers that he can predict
the future (and maybe save the
universe) by observing statistical
patterns and probabilities on a galactic
scale. On a small scale his system is
error-prone however, he observes that
a mass of people is predictable if the
quantity of this mass is very large …
The larger the number, the more
predictable is the future.Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick

10. In the fictional future that Hari Seldon inhabits the
internet has not been invented (Asimov published
the first installment of the story in 1951). How the
data was collected in the first place is never
mentioned, but the Psychohistorians in the book
spend a lot of time pouring over books and jotting
down calculations while trying to avert the crumbling
of the empire.
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick
Ironically….

11. These days we have the
internet….
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick

12. Instead of a bunch of old guys doing a
hundred years worth of algebra ….
All it takes is a fast computer
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick


13. …Which brings us back to
metadata…
• Like psychohistory, metadata collection and
analysis makes it much easier to make
predictions about all sorts of things - from human
behavior to the spread of diseases - than ever
before
• “When we interact over our modern
communications infrastructure, we send data
about the communication that allows it to
successfully reach its intended recipient.
Traditionally this is what was called
communications metadata.”
-The Student Coalition forMetadata for beginners - Kaile Glick

14. Thank you for watching my power
point!
Any Questions?
Metadata for beginners - Kaile Glick