1. AKA: Contextual Data Needed to Make Data Meaningful to Others
Metadata
AKA: Contextual Data Needed to Make Data Meaningful to Others

2. Check-in
Any questions from last week?

3. Part of data lifecycle

4. Learning Objectives Understand what metadata is
Understand why metadata is important
Identify how to locate applicable standards for capturing and documenting metadata
Understand varying practices associated with the collection and sharing of metadata
Identify an approach to creating metadata for a project

5. What is Metadata?
“Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource. Metadata is often called data about data or information about information” (NISO, Understanding Metadata 2004;1).
In plain English: metadata is used to record information about data that has been collected.
It’s essential to enabling the use and reuse of data.
Module 3: Metadata

6. You must have metadata to:
find data from other researchers to support your research;
use the data that you find;
help other professionals to find and use data from your research; and
use your own data in the future when you may have forgotten details of the research.
(taken from the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project,
Module 3: Metadata

7. Basic Types of Metadata
Descriptive metadata
Structural metadata
Administrative metadata
All three should give you a (mostly) complete picture of the object’s content, context and structure.
Descriptive metadata describes the object or data and gives the basic facts: who created it (i.e. authorship), title, keywords, and abstract.
Structural metadata describes the structure of an object including its components and how they are related. It also describes the format, process, and inter-relatedness of objects. It can be used to facilitate navigation, or define the format or sequence of complex objects.
Administrative metadata includes information about the management of the object and may include information about: preservation and rights management, creation date, copyright permissions, required software, provenance (history), and file integrity checks
Module 3: Metadata

8. How Metadata Facilitates Discoverability and Reuse
Accessibility
Ever searched for a business website and had it show up 3rd or 4th in your search results? That’s bad metadata.
Accessibility and discoverability will also depend on the existence of high-quality metadata. The more you have, and the more organized it is, the easier it will be to search for an object. Users query databases for information, and objects, based on the metadata that exists for an object. Searching by author, title, format, or a phrase in the description requires that information of those kinds exist (a value for each of those fields in a metadata record).
Examples: Google search, library catalog search, genomic database search: if proper detailed information about an object isn’t available, users won’t find it.
Module 3: Metadata

9. Some Sample Metadata Standards
Darwin Core
Ecological Metadata Language (EML)
Climate and Forecast (CF)
List here:
Darwin Core: Intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological data
Ecological Metadata Language (EML): Particularly developed for the ecological discipline
CF (Climate and Forecast) Metadata Conventions: A standard for climate and forecast that distinguishes quantities and time
Module 3: Metadata

10. Examples of Standards Discipline Metadata Standard Description Biology
Darwin Core
A body of standards, including a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries.
Ecology
EML - Ecological Metadata Language
Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata specification particularly developed for the ecology discipline.
Earth Science
AgMES - Agricultural Metadata Element Set
A semantic standard for description, resource discovery, interoperability and data exchange for different types of agricultural information resources.

11. Example records
(National Center for Biotechnology Information database record)
(FGDC example)
What Dublin Core looks like:

12. Collecting and Sharing Metadata
Controlled vocabularies
Technical standards
Controlled vocabularies & Technical Standards ensure the ability to share data across systems and with people
Controlled vocabularies are simply lists of predefined terms that ensure consistency of use, and help to disambiguate similar concepts.
Technical standards ensure that the units such as date and time, format, etc… are entered consistently amongst different researchers.
Module 3: Metadata

13. Controlled Vocabularies
Help take the guess work out of choosing between:
a preferred spelling (donut vs doughnut)
a scientific or popular term (western red cedar vs thuja plicata)
determining which synonym to use (automaton vs robot)
Metadata standards likely provide a best practice recommendation for which CV and standards to use
Some other examples of controlled vocabularies include the ERIC Thesaurus for education terms ( the IEE INSPEC Thesaurus of the Scientific and Technical terms ( and the Centre for Agricultural Bioscience international’s CAB Thesaurus (
Module 3: Metadata

14. Technical Standards
Somewhat ambiguous descriptive term, but what we mean is:
A common understanding of how you and your group/field/university/etc. will record elements such as time, date, format, etc.

15. Technical Standards ISO 8601 technical standard: YYYY (e.g. 1997)
YYYY-MM (e.g )
YYYY-MM-DD
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD (date plus hours, minutes and seconds.. goes on to decimal fractions of a second, etc.)
By standardizing the style of recording, you’ll know that
- everyone reads it the same way, whether in your group or across the world
- it’s machine-readable
Module 3: Metadata

16. Approaches to Creating Metadata
First, identify your standard.
Sources
Data processing, etc.
See list here for other possible elements and their definitions:
Then, identify your elements:
Title
Creator
Identifier
Subject
Dates
Rights
Location
Methodology
Generally comes about by a combination of manual and automatic extraction.
Manual metadata is generally descriptive in nature.
You will be entering it into a form, a spreadsheet, etc.
Automatic extraction is generally technical in nature (for example, a photograph’s pixel resolution, time and place taken, etc.)
Generally will occur via software.
What method you’re using and who is producing it (or a combination) must be decided as part of your project plan/DMP at the outset.
Module 3: Metadata

17. Purpose of Metadata To ensure: discovery use, and
resuse of your research
It may seem complicated, but remember: the entire purpose of metadata is:

18. Best Practices Always use an established metadata standard
Consistent data entry is important
Avoid extraneous punctuation
Avoid most abbreviations
Use templates and macros when possible
Extract pre-existing metadata
Keep a data dictionary
UW has metadata librarians available for consultations
Consistent data entry is important. Review your metadata for typos, extraneous punctuation, and any inconsistencies in fielded entry, such as putting an author into a title field.
Avoid extraneous punctuation as it can create retrieval issues.
Avoid most abbreviations
Use templates and macros when possible (if there are repeated elements, this cuts down on time and errors)
Extract pre-existing metadata from your sources whenever possible
Keep a data dictionary of the elements, technical standards, and controlled vocabularies you use in your project.
Always use an established metadata standard. Your discipline probably already has a best practices metadata standard specific to your research needs.
Module 3: Metadata

19. Sources for this Unit What is metadata:
National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Understanding Metadata.
Neiswender, C "Introduction to Metadata." In The MMI Guides: Navigating the World of Marine Metadata. Accessed April 1, 2013.
Reuse and discoverability:
Miller, Steven J Metadata Resources: Selected Reference Documents, Web Sites, and Readings:
Wikipedia page on “Metadata”:
Module 3: Metadata

20. Sources for this Unit (cont’d)
Metadata standards:
Digital Curation Centre’s Disciplinary Metadata resource.
Hogrefe, K., Stocks, K "The Importance of Metadata Standards." In The MMI Guides: Navigating the World of Marine Metadata. Accessed March 22, 2013.
Other suggested readings
Introduction to Metadata: Setting the Stage (Getty Research Institute)
Documentation and Metadata (MIT Libraries):
Version control and authenticity
Module 3: Metadata