Techreport,
Understanding metadata : what is metadata, and what is it for?
National Information Standards Organization (NISO), (2017)
Abstract
Consider how retailers store information about their products and their customers; employers about their employees and their operations; organizations about events they manage; research institutions about trends and notable people in their area; libraries, archives, and museums about the materials in their care; governments about their citizens, their allies, and their enemies—this is all metadata. Metadata, the information we create, store, and share to describe things, allows us to interact with these things to obtain the knowledge we need. The classic definition is literal, based on the etymology of the word itself—metadata is “data about data.” With this broad definition, one might expect that metadata could be found everywhere, and in fact it is. Indeed, in 2013, metadata became a household term in the United States through heavy media coverage of the National Security Agency’s collection of information on domestic telephone calls, including time and location initiated, duration, and number dialed.
