Metadata describes and explains data. It is often referred to in relation to photos, because modern photos’ data format includes device, location, and timestamp data for your camera. Those three things are essentially called metadata. It has been a widely used term for decades, but how much do you know about metadata? This interesting topic came to us from Yahoo Finance in their article, “What is Metadata? YF explains.”

Metadata plays a crucial role in data management, data discovery, and interoperability. It helps users locate and assess the relevance and quality of data, facilitates data integration across different systems, and enables efficient data retrieval and analysis.

Metadata is a shorthand representation of the objects to which they refer. Proper metadata management ensures that the entire tech stack — with potentially disparate systems, platforms, and tools — somewhere speaks a common language for interoperability.

In short, metadata is important, especially when it comes to findability. Metadata makes digital content findable. However, findability works only when a proper taxonomy is in place. Proper indexing against a strong, standards-based taxonomy increases the findability of data. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.

Melody K. Smith

Data Harmony is an award-winning semantic suite that leverages explainable AI.

Sponsored by Access Innovations, changing search to found.