Hi, I'm Cable o'dell, a member of the Taxonomy Ontology and Natural language processing team helping to define and design ontology and information architecture processes for E services. In a previous video, I described the differences between structured and unstructured content.
The difference of course is structure but how do you structure data? The core method is to collect data about the data or metadata by definition data are discrete facts or the representation of those facts. Meta is a prefix which indicates the modified term is self referential or about itself.
Therefore, metadata is data which describes a specific piece of data. For example, the date a document is created or by whom is metadata about that document metadata has likely existed nearly as long as the ability to record data, but it doesn't often show up in the analog world.
Some of you may be familiar with library card catalogs. These catalogs were collections of index cards, each with a summary of metadata about a book, an author or a subject. Each card described the pertinent facts about their topic organized in a rational fashion to make the cards findable.
In many cases, the data was duplicated or repeated in multiple locations to ensure that many paths led to the appropriate information. Once a suitable book was located, the card would provide the necessary information to locate it in the stacks. Metadata is not constrained by the needs of a library.
Card catalogs exist to solve a specific problem how to connect a user looking for a specific book or books by specific authors or books on specific subjects. Modern metadata is similar in purpose, if not necessarily in function, what kinds of data are stored as metadata in general metadata will fall into one of these categories. Each domain of which supports different needs and functions.
The goal should be to store that which makes the data more useful or findable. Metadata is not something created because you can metadata is created because you need it. In the example of the card catalog, each of those facts is presented because they represent common avenues which are used to find the right content allowing a searcher to quickly find a pointer to the information they need today.
In the era of modern computing, metadata is everywhere with few limitations on what can have metadata or what shape it must be in utility or usability is the largest constraint, understand your needs. And when information is required to meet them, then collect that information in a way that it can be used. And in the end, that's what metadata is, data about data, which makes the data more useful
Thank you for watching. Oh, I hope that can.
