i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

16 September 2009

The easist way to indicate what something means is to give it a name, label, tag, or description .  This additional information about an object or about an instance or type of information is "metadata" because it is not part of the thing or its content.  "What is being described" can be considered on two separate dimensions - the contexts/containers/collections in which it occurs, and the level of abstraction (how large is the set of instances that are treated as equivalent when metadata is assigned).  How much metadata, what kind, and who should provide it are fundamental concerns. Some "contextual" metadata can be assigned automatically, but this raises questions about the identification and scope of the context.