Definition — What is Metadata?

For example, the index of an E-book serves as metadata for the contents in the E-book. In other words, we can say that metadata is the summarized data that leads us with details like author, date created, file size, and more.  Metadata can be created manually or through automation. Accuracy is increased using manual creation as it allows the user to input relevant information. Automated metadata creation can be more elementary, usually only displaying basic information such as file size, file extension, when the file was created.

It is important for organizations to classify data. Usually, we find data in organizations as structured and unstructured, both need metadata. Structured data is easily organized and discovered through search engine algorithms, while unstructured data is the complete opposite such as business documents: The multitude of documents that are used to conduct business, like emails, presentations, and reports contain data in the form of text, images, numbers, or video and are unstructured. These documents form important knowledge repositories within the organization, but currently, they are mostly in form of unstructured data, making sorting and defining the data a time-consuming and expensive proposition, but metadata can help.

There is a wide variety of metadata depending on its purpose, format, quality, and volume. Some of the widely used categories of metadata are: 

• Descriptive metadata helps users discover and identify different types of assets through a given set of keywords like file extension, file title, author,  file type, etc.
  

• Administrative metadata gives important instructions about a file. It informs what type of restrictions are to be placed on the file, such as who can access it or not. An example of administrative metadata would be a business file that is identified as a specific file type.
  

• Structural metadata indicates how a digital asset will be organized. An example of organized data would be something similar to lines, paragraphs, pages, and chapters in a book. Structural metadata also indicates whether the data is part of an individual collection or multiple collections.