The Data Needle in the Haystack

August 18, 2016 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on The Data Needle in the Haystack

In a digital world, metadata attached to files contains valuable information – even more than you think. This interesting information came from Business 2 Community in their article, “The Power of Metadata.”

Metadata isn’t the actual file data; it is the data about the data, which can include author and copyright information, revision history, and comments, along with geotracking information and other descriptive attributes.

The value of this metadata is in archival and retrieval purposes. Like the Library of Congress Classification system used by libraries that house large volumes of information, metadata allows users and systems to organize and traverse large data stores.

It is estimated that by 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created for every human being on the planet — every second. That will require some comprehensive indexing to make the data findable. Without strong taxonomies and standardized methods to manage the data, a difficult situation can develop.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.