‘Data that describes data’
IDEA No 45
METADATA
There are more than 4 billion pages on the Web. Estimates have suggested that if you were to print them, they would take 57,000 years to read.
Henriette Avram, creator of the first digital metadata in 1970, the MARC standards (Machine-readable Cataloging standards) at the Library of Congress.
Not everybody wants to read the entire Web. Luckily, we have ways of prioritizing what we read. It’s called metadata.
Metadata is data that describes data. For example, how it was created, when it was created, who created it, etc. An early example of metadata is the Dewey Decimal System used by libraries: 3 x ...
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