Metadata

Home	Metadata is data about a dataset within a media and involves a format of data mining. Examples would be executive summaries and scientific abstracts. An item of metadata may describe content items and hierarchical levels, such as a database scheme. In data processing, metadata provides information about other data within an application or environment. Metadata records data about data attributes (ex. name, size, and data type), data structures (ex. length, fields, and columns), and about the actual data itself (ex. where it is located, how it is associated, and ownership). Descriptive information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of the data may also be included. Metadata helps with the understanding, characteristics, and management usage of data. The metadata required for effective data management varies with the type of data and context of use. Metadata for a book would include the author, publisher, and ISBN number. Metadata for a camera would include the date the picture was taken and details of the camera settings, such as lens, focal length, aperture, shutter timing, and white balance. For a digital music player, the metadata would include the album names, song titles, and album art embedded within the music files to generate the artist and song listings. With an information system, the metadata about a data item would include the name of the field and its length. For a collection of data items or a computer file, the metadata would be the name of the file, the type of file, and the name of the data administrator. It can be impossible to determine the difference between (plain) data and metadata. For example, a title of an article is metadata and part of its text is data. Another example, a poem is data, but if there's a song that uses it as lyrics, the poem is attached to an audio file of the song as metadata. Metadata can also optimize lossy compression to tell the foreground from the background of a picture or video and to compress to a higher compression rate. Metadata also helps blind people access diagrams and pictures by converting them to special output devices or reading their description using text-to-speech software. Metadata is used to speed up applications and the searching process for resources. Metadata helps users save time with search queries and keeps them from performing complex filter operations manually.
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