Metadata is a common word these days. It is used in every day vernacular like Internet and smart technology. But what is it exactly? This interesting topic came to our attention from Make Use Of in their article, “What Is Metadata and What Can It Reveal About You?“
The term metadata has been around since the late 20th century. But it’s been gaining a larger portion of industry headlines the past few years. Metadata highlights the importance of understanding and protecting your personal data, privacy and security.
A literal translation is “about data”. While metadata is rarely useful data on its own, it’s often a summary of a much larger data set. Metadata is often categorized depending on the type of information it reveals about the source file.
Descriptive metadata is the most commonly used type of metadata. It describes the contents of the file in question. The information within descriptive metadata is typically used for filtering and searching through a large library of files, often of the same type.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
