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Business Intelligence

Notes 4.7 Metadata

The term metadata refers to “data about data”. The term is ambiguous, as it is utilised for two
basically different notions (types). Structural metadata is about the creation and specification of
data organisations and is more correctly called “data about the containers of data”; descriptive
metadata, on the other hand, is about one-by-one examples of submission data, the data content.
In this case, a helpful recount would be “data about data content” or “content about content”
thus metacontent.
Metadata (metacontent) are generally found in the business card catalogues of libraries. As data
has become progressively digital, metadata are furthermore used to recount digital data utilising
metadata measures exact to a particular control and respect. By describing the contents and
context of data documents, the value of the original data/files is greatly bigger.

Example: A webpage may contain metadata identifying what language it is in writing
in, what tools were utilised to create it, and where to proceed for more on the subject, permitting
browsers to automatically improve the know-how of users.
Metadata (metacontent) are characterized as the data providing information about one or more
aspects of data, such as:

Means of creation of the data
Purpose of the data
Time and date of creation

Creator or author of the data
Location on a computer mesh where the data were created

Example: A digital image may include metadata that describe how large the picture is,
the hue deepness, the image resolution, when the image was created, and other data.
A text document’s metadata may comprise information about how long the document is, who
the author is, when the article was written, and a short abstract of the article.
As such, metadata can be stored and organised in a database, often called a Metadata registry or
Metadata repository. However, without context and a reference, it might be impossible to
identify metadata just by looking at them.

Example: By itself, a database consisting of several figures, all 10 digits long could be the
results of computed results or a list of numbers to close into an equation - without any other
context, the figures themselves can be seen as the data.

Did u know? The term “metadata” was coined in 1968 by Philip Bagley, in his book
“Extension of programming dialect notions”.
Following Figure 4.5 show an example of metadata.

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