Metadata

Helping to get the metadata schema right

The Digital Heritage and Cultural Content sector of IST has a number of activities that relate to metadata. Metadata is sometimes defined literally as 'data about data,' but the term is normally understood to mean structured data about resources that can be used to help support a wide range of activities. These might include, for example:

• Resource description and discovery
• The management of resources, e.g. to record information about their location and acquisition, to record any intellectual property rights vested in resources and to help manage user access to them
• The recording of technical information, e.g. for recording digitisation parameters or documenting how individual resources relate to other resources or to particular software and hardware environments
• Electronic recordkeeping - supporting the creation, management and preservation of electronic records
• The long-term preservation of digital information, helping preserve the content, context and authenticity of resources

While the first use of the term 'metadata' originated in contexts that were almost always related to digital information (in particular with regard to databases), the general understanding of the term has since broadened to include any kind of standardised descriptive information about resources, including those in non-digital form. So, for example, library catalogues, the products of abstracting and indexing services, archival finding aids and museum documentation might all be seen as containing kinds of metadata. The use of the term metadata has several advantages:

• It facilitates co-operation between different types of cultural heritage organisation across professional boundaries
• It can help the creation of hybrid services that give access to metadata that describes both digital and non-digital resources
• It enables cultural heritage organisations to communicate more effectively with the myriad other domains that have an interest in descriptive metadata: e.g., software developers, publishers, the recording industry, television companies, the producers of digital educational content and those concerned with geographical and satellite-generated information

The most well-known metadata initiative is the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The Dublin Core defines fifteen metadata elements for simple resource discovery and which can also serve as an intermediary between the numerous community-specific formats that have been or are being developed. The elements are title, creator, subject and keywords, description, publisher, contributor, date, resource type, format, resource identifier, source, language, relation, coverage and rights management. The Dublin Core has already been used for heterogeneous resource discovery in service developed by the EULER project and the catalogue of the UK Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). A subset of the Dublin Core is also being used in the Renardus project to help broker access to multiple subject gateways.

Note

This text was produced as an introduction to metadata for the Web pages of the digital heritage and cultural content area of Key Action 3 (Multimedia Content and Tools) of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme (part of the EU's Fifth Framework Programme). It was written by Michael Day (UKOLN) and the full Web page can (6-Jun-2002) be found at the URL: http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/metadata.htm