This document provides an introduction to metadata, including what it is, its purposes, and types. Metadata is data that describes other data, such as author, title, and subject for a document. It helps identify, manage, retrieve, and connect related content. There are three main types - descriptive, structural, and administrative. Metadata standards like Dublin Core and taxonomies help ensure consistency and enable interoperability across collections. High quality metadata requires careful planning, structure, and maintenance.

1. Metadata 101
An introduction metadata and data management
By Dominique Gerald M. Cimafranca
villageidiotsavant.com
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Philippines
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2. What is Metadata?
Data that provides information
about other data
A collection of structured information
about a document or a piece of content
For example: Author, Title, Subject, Issue
Date, Publisher

3. Metadata isn't new...
Image from http://www.meerimage.com/

4. In fact, the stuff you have may
already have it...
...and you just didn't know it.

5. Purpose of Metadata
● To identify content
● Capture fields and distinguish each document from all others
● Manage content
● Version numbers, archive date, security and access permissions
● Retrieval of content
● Taxonomy topics, subject keywords, document type
● Connect content to other content
● Behavioral metadata captured in transaction (e.g., Amazon)
● Business processes
● Authored by whom? Reviewed by whom and when? Approved by whom and
when?
● Support records management
● Retention periods, disposition cycle

6. In a nutshell...
...to make information easy to
find, manage, and contextualize.

7. However...
Metadata is most useful in collections
Metadata is most useful when shared
Metadata is most useful in collaboration

8. Issues with information access today
● Tons of content from disparate sources
● Cumbersome navigation
● Keyword search assumes that you know what you are
looking for
● Large number of search results – most of them
irrelevant
● Lack of context in search results
● Search engines rely on mathematical algorithms to
determine relevance and ranking of search results

9. Types of Metadata
● Descriptive
●
Describes a resource for discovery and
identification, e.g., abstract, author, keywords
●
Structural
● Indicates how the parts of the resource are
arranged, e.g., chapters in a book
● Administrative
●
Provides information on how to manage a resource,
e.g., when it was created, who has access to it

10. Structural Metadata
● Structural metadata defines the relationship
between whole and parts.
● Structural metadata can also be used for
navigational purposes, e.g., links to related
files.

11. Administrative Metadata
● Administrative metadata provides information
to help manage a resource, such as when and
how it was created, file type, and other
technical information, and who can access it.
●
Most common subsets
●
Rights management metadata
● Preservation metadata

12. Why Metadata?
● Resource discovery
● Organizing electronic resources
● Interoperability
●
Digital identification
●
Archiving and presentation

13. Metadata alone isn't enough...
...even Metadata has to be properly
thought out and properly used.

14. Planning Metadata
● Whose requirements are you trying to meet?
●
Who are your users and what are their
requirements?
●
What is your business case?
● Why should you undertake this project?
● What is your business model?
●
How will this project be worthwhile?

15. Metadata Structure
● Recognized standards
● Local specifications
● Social tagging systems

16. Metadata Quality
● Technical Quality
● Adherence to local or international standards,
specifications, and application profiles
● Semantic Quality
● Proper use of controlled vocabularies and semantic
standards
● Value Quality
● Populating metadata fields appropriately for describing
the resource and its relationships for the benefit of the
user community and other stakeholders

17. “Accurate, consistent, sufficient, and
thus reliable.”
--Greenberg & Robertson, 2002

18. Nine Guiding Questions
● Who will be using the collection?
● Who is the collection cataloger?
● How much time and money do you have?
● How will your collection be accessed?
● How is your collection related to other collections?
● What is the scope of your collection?
● Will your metadata be harvested?
● Do you want your collection to work with other collections?
● How much maintenance and quality control do you wish?
http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/viewArticle/226/205

19. Use cases for Metadata
● Resource discovery
● Resource selection
● Resource aggregation and manipulation
● Intellectual property rights
● Digital preservation
● Marketing
● Accessibility
● Interoperability
● Workflow identification
● Reputation (of individuals and organizations)

20. How is Metadata created? By humans...
● Created by resource authors
● Added by resource depositors
● Created, checked, augmented by professionals
● Catalogers
● Subject Experts
● Designated IPR keepers
● Enriched by resource users
● Additional description, comments, annotations, descriptions of usage
● Corrections
● Enrichment (additional subject description)
● Social tagging
● Ratings and recommendations

21. ...or by machines
● Extraction from resource files
● Inferred from resource relationships
● Creation according to system settings
●
Generation of default values
●
Extraction via text mining

22. The need for Metadata standards
● Different information providers using different
metadata schemas
● Even metadata schemas of groups within
organizations are different or out of sync
●
Result
●
Inconsistent search results
● Lack of interoperability
● Information silos

23. Dublin Core
● General purpose metadata standard for use across domains
● 15 core elements
● Element qualifiers to narrow the meaning of elements
● E.g., Date Created vs Date Modified
● Encoding schemes: controlled vocabularies or parsing rules
to refine the interpretation of an element
● Can be represented in HTML and XML (RDF)
● See http://dublincore.org

24. Dublin Core Metadata Elements

25. Taxonomy
● A classification scheme
●
Designed to group related things together
●
Semantic
●
Fixed vocabulary that is meaningful to its users
● A knowledge map
●
Should give the user a grasp of the structure of the
knowledge domain
● Establishes relationships between objects

26. Government-related taxonomies
● Australian Governments' Interactive Functions Thesaurus
● Three-level hierarchical thesaurus that describes business functions
carried out through Australian government units
● 25 high-level functions with second and third level terms
● Purpose: to aid online discovery of government information and
services
● Functions of New Zealand and Subjects of New Zealand
● Thesauri for NZ government resources
● Classification of all-of-government level
http://www.naa.gov.au/records-management/create-capture-describe/describe/agift/index.aspx
http://www.e.govt.nz/standards/nzgls/thesauri/

27. Actually, we don't need to look
outside...

28. Remember!
Metadata is most useful in collections
Metadata is most useful when shared
Metadata is most useful in collaboration

30. Sources
●
Metadata Primer (http://www.slideshare.net/selvats/metadata-primer)
●
AGIFT (http://www.naa.gov.au/records-management/create-capture-describe/describe/classification/agift/index.htm)
●
Taxonomy and Metadata (http://www.slideshare.net/dchampeau/taxonomy-and-metadata)
●
Understanding Metadata (www.niso.org/standards/resources/UnderstandingMetadata.pdf)
●
An Introduction to Metadata (http://www.library.uq.edu.au/iad/ctmeta4.html)
●
NZGLS thesauri (http://www.e.govt.nz/standards/nzgls/thesauri/downloads.html)
●
If you tag it, will they come? (Sarah Currier)
●
Nine questions to guide you in choosing a metadata schema
(http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/viewArticle/226/205)