With the establishment of new technologies and everything related to the virtual environment, the concept of metadata has gained special prominence. In the computer science sector it is widely used and is always related to the data that is used to describe other types of data.
Metadata definitions
Metadata is a term that was coined in the 1960s to describe a set of data, but it is now when it is gaining more importance and when it is being heard the most in the virtual world. Its first meaning was that of data on data, but as of 2004 it evolved until it became what we know today: metadata.
The etymology of this term consists of two words, one Greek and one Latin. On the one hand the Greek word “meta”, which means after or beyond, and on the other hand the Latin word “datum”, which means data. Likewise, the metadata expression is formed as beyond the data. Based on this, metadata is a set of data that describes the informational content of a resource, of files or of their information. That is, it is information that describes other data. However, the word metadata does not have an exclusive definition, since there are several expressions with which it is known, such as information about data, information about information or data about information.
Despite the fact that the word metadata is used today, generally for the field of computing, the concept predates the Internet, although the interest it has generated has led to its use in this environment. The term metadata is mainly widely used in the field of computing, focused on companies due to the acquisition of a unique relevance in recent times as a result of the large amounts of information that are currently handled in companies. For this reason, metadata is used to help manage the data or information with which they work for greater effectiveness and performance.
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- What are its uses?
Although metadata has a specific utility, it is true that it can be used for much more than the essential. Due to this, metadata has as its main characteristic that it is multifunctional . It is a tool that has multiple advantages that allow good data administration when the management and governance processes of the information contained are carried out. Thus, we are going to detail all the functions that metadata has:
- They facilitate search and analysis:metadata helps to find data more easily and allows data analysis to be carried out from the source itself, favoring self-documentation, transformation and reporting, among other functions.
- Improves data governance:managing metadata in a standardized environment makes good data governance possible and this, in turn, makes the program successful.
- Integration Helps –Using metadata for joint use between IT and business users enables better comprehensive integration. In this way it also helps to improve data management more globally.
- Facilitates standardization: this is possible thanks to the elimination of errors and weaknesses. Thus, it improves the quality of metadata throughout its life cycle. In addition, through managing these, it is possible to have a more complete vision of said cycle, from beginning to end.
- Improve reports: the correct management of metadata will make reports better, allowing them to be delivered safely and reliably. This is due to the ease of intervention that makes the processes of higher quality.
- Develop faster: Accessing metadata intelligently increases creators throughput and minimizes the provisioning period for connectivity. This reduces the costs of the modifications that occur.
- Manage changes:metadata management provides an improved view, as well as the control that is required for the integration of business data. The changes will be observed through the automation of the impact studies, so that action can be taken to solve the problems that may arise as a result.
- Greater security:in the event of changes, critical company data must be protected, as well as helping to strictly comply with the regulations in question. This can be done as a consequence of proper metadata management.
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- Metadata classification
Based on everything related above, it can be seen that metadata is a tool that provides the necessary help to companies that master a large amount of information, organizing it to facilitate the work of users and accelerating their productivity . In addition, there are many uses for which metadata is used, but before continuing to advance in the matter we must stop along the way, to know the classification of metadata in terms of its functions. Thus, these are classified using three essential criteria, differentiated by: their function, their variability and their content.
- By its function:in this first classification, it is understood that the data handled may belong to one of the three types of functions it has: logical, symbolic or subsymbolic. Briefly detailing them, we can say that logics are data that explains how symbolic data can be used to make deductions from logical results, which is why they are characterized by compression. Symbolic data is data that details subsymbolic data, thus adding meaning. And finally, the subsymbolic data is what does not contain any information about its meaning.
- Due to its variability: in this aspect, the metadata can be classified according to their variability, into two groups. On the one hand, there would be the immutable, which are the data that does not change regardless of the part of the resource that is visible. And, on the other hand, there would be the mutables, which are those that are different from the others and even differ from part to part.
- Due to its content: this last classification is the most usual. In this case, the metadata is divided by its content. In this way, it is possible to distinguish between the metadata that details the resource itself and the metadata that describes the content of that resource. However, these two groups can even be subdivided into more subgroups depending on the precision with which we want to classify the data.
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- The life cycle of metadata
Metadata has a structure in terms of the functions they perform. That is, they have a life cycle that details each stage through which it passes, doing certain tasks in each one of them. Thus, in this aspect we can differentiate the life cycle of metadata into three phases: creation, manipulation and destruction.
- Creation: at this stage is when the metadata is created. These can be developed in different ways, either manually, automatically or semi-automatically.
- Manual form: itcan become a somewhat complicated procedure, although it all depends on the format that is used and the volume that is being searched for. Anyway, any of the other two forms of creation that we detail below is more used.
- Automatic way:in this case, the software receives all the required information on its own, that is, without any external help. However, despite the technological advances in terms of the algorithms used in this regard, it is not feasible for the computer to automatically extract each and every one of the metadata by itself. So this form is not the most suitable either, although it is also used frequently.
- Semi-automatic way:This is the ideal way to create metadata. Through this system, a series of autonomous algorithms are established that the user in question maintains and that do not allow the software to extract the desired data by itself, but needs external help to do so.
- Manipulation: in this phase, changes are made in certain aspects. Therefore, if the data in question changes, the metadata must also change and this will be done easily and automatically, although there are times when human help is needed to engineer this work.
- Destruction: as the last phase that can be carried out in the life of metadata is its destruction. In this case, you have to study well how to do it. On certain occasions, the metadata is removed at the same time as its resources together. However, there are other situations in which metadata is preserved for different reasons, such as to control modifications to a document.
- What is the common use of metadata?
As we have already seen in a previous section, the term metadata has several uses. However, there is a common use that is the most frequent and that is the refinement of search engine queries. In this way, the user is helped to find more precise results and not to waste time searching manually. Likewise, the metadata provides the necessary assistance to categorize the information that is available and make communication between the user and the computer easier. Therefore, metadata makes work easier by classifying and structuring the available data.
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- Storage of metadata
We have already explored the question of how metadata is classified according to the data or information it contains, but there are still other questions, such as where the metadata can be stored to keep it safe and well organized. In this case, there are two ways to store the metadata safely:
- Internal deposit: that is, deposit the metadata internally in the same file as the data.
- External deposit:it is about depositing them externally in the same resource.
In principle, metadata used to be stored internally in the same document or file as the data itself, and this was done with the aim of allowing a favorable administration of the same. In contrast, nowadays the external tank is often considered the best storage choice. This is because in this way it is possible for the metadata to be grouped to improve search actions. However, there is a problem here. This is the way to join a resource with its metadata. In this sense, in most cases the URIs technique is used, which locates documents on the World Wide Web, although this also generates another problem in turn, which is that not all of them have documents that have URLs.
However, there is one aspect that should be noted when it comes to storing metadata: encoding.Based on this, metadata were originally saved using unencrypted texts or even binary encoding to store them in specific files. But today it is common to use the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to do this, which helps define the markup languages created by the World Wide Web Consortium used to store data in a readable way. This applies both for users and for the computers themselves, since it is a language that has many characteristics that make it suitable for these cases. Although despite the advantages that it entails, it also has a series of disadvantages, such as memory space, since the data requires more volume than the binary format provides. However,.
