Misc,
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
(2000)
Abstract
lication will find and process the metadata you provided. Metadata, structured data about data, may support a number of functions, such as location, discovery, documentation, evaluation, and selection of resources. Long-time preservation of electronic documents is emerging as one of the key areas as well. These activities may be carried out by human end-users or (human or automated) agents. The quality of metadata naturally has a major impact on searching -- Alta Vista provides gigabytes of metadata from millions of documents, but finding tens of thousands of hits as a result of even quite narrow searches is not a good result. Metadata structure is defined in formats, which again are based implicitly or explicitly on something that the library community calls cataloguing rules, agreements on how to extract metadata from the resource. Both the cataloguing rules and the format may be very simple or extremely complicated. Depending on this background, it may be necessary to have
