Types of Metadata
There are mainly five types of metadata as shown below.
1. Preservation Metadata
Preservation metadata is nothing but it is the type of the metadata which is designed to be the long term accessibility of the digital assets. It is served as a comprehensive record for the necessary information for the preservation and management of digital collections, most of the context of digital libraries, museums and other cultural institutions.
Preservation metadata is used to stores the information in long time with digital assets. It includes the information about the authentications and preserve actions taken on the content. This metadata preserved the necessary information for the long-term preservation and manages the digital assets, ensuring their integrity and usability over time.
Example: This metadata includes the information about the formats of the file, migration strategies, schemas of the metadata and preservation actions for maintaining the data accessibility. It supports the activity related to the digital preservation like migration of the data and risk management.
2. Descriptive Metadata
Descriptive metadata described about the detailed information of the content and the characteristics of the particular piece of the data, enables the users to the understand the meaning of the content and context of the content. This metadata plays a main role for enabling users to the discover and understand the digital resources effectively. The descriptive metadata describe about the title, author/creator, subject/keywords, abstract/summary, date, format, languages, identifier, spatial coverage, temporal coverage, rights information.
Descriptive metadata is used to describes the content and providing the information such as author of the content, title of the content, summary of the content, theme of the content, dates, key points of the content. It is helped to the users for better understanding the content.
Example: This metadata type consists of attributes like title, author, subjects, keywords, abstracts and other description parts of the document what the data describe about. In the digital context like documents, descriptive metadata also includes the details of the documentation such as location, creation date, format and size of the file.
3. Technical Metadata
It provide the detailed information about technical characteristics and properties of the digital asset. It served a main role of the facilitate the management, processing and interoperability of the digital resources across the different platforms and the environments.
Technical metadata is used to describe about the technical words of the content i.e. specifications of the hardware, encoding, formats of the file, resolution of the file, software used in the content etc.,
Example: This metadata tells about the format of the file, size of the file, color space, method of compression, software is used to create and manipulates the data. Technical metadata can be includes the Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) data contains the settings of the camera and other technical information.
4. Structural Metadata
In structural metadata, it provides the information about organization, about arrangements and relationships with the digital asset. It helps to the users to navigate and understand the internal structure and the hierarchical components. It is worked for interact with the content and accessing the content, it enables the users to navigate with the difficult information architectures and receive the data efficiently.
The purpose of structural metadata is to provide details about the organization and relationships within the content or dataset. Let us consider an example, In a book, structural metadata can be include the title of the chapter, headings of the chapter, contents, indexes, etc.,
Example: In structural metadata, it can be include about the chapters, about the sections, about the headings, about paragraphs and the page sequences. This multimedia includes the multimedia files such as videos and records, it includes timestamp, markers and pointers.
5. Administrative Metadata
Administrative metadata is nothing but it gives the information about the management, about the administration and governance of the digital assets with its lifecycle. It served as a foundation for the resource management, traceability and compliance with the organizational policies and its standards. Metadata can enabled the efficient
Administrative metadata is used to data provides the administration of the content and management. This metadata might be include the ownership of the data, right to the access, update/create the date and formats of the files.
Example: This metadata can include the details like author, date of the creation, access permissions, history and restrictions of the Digital Rights Management (DRM). It also describe about the storage of the data, strategies for the preservation.
What is Metadata?
Metadata is nothing but it is a structural or descriptive information that gives additional information about a particular information or data. In this article, we will understand types of metadata, functions of metadata and more.