Index Data  >  Technologies  >  Metadata

The digitization of resources coupled with the ubiquity of the World Wide Web has created a virtual universe which contains an ever increasing percentage of the worlds cultural heritage. Before the Web was developed, individual libraries and publishers tried to organize and manage only the information they owned or collected. Today, libraries and their software vendors are trying to develop tools to organize the entire universe of digital resources. We are just at the beginning of this daunting effort.

Managing the world's cultural heritage and making it easy for people everywhere to discover and use that heritage is a task that will take years if not generations to accomplish. The knowledge of what works and what doesn't work is still unfolding. But two things are already clear: metadata is an indispensable tool in the effort to manage the digital universe of information, and standardization in the use of metadata vastly increases its effectiveness.

Metadata is data that helps locate and manage resources by describing those resources, usually in standardized ways using a variety of community-based rules. It is almost always structured data--data which is encoded using standards such as MARC or XML. Metadata can be divided into two broad categories: descriptive metadata used to discover and locate resources, and administrative metadata, used to control access to resources and to manage them.

Metadata is at the heart of everything we do at Index Data. All of our products and services are designed to use metadata to discover and manage resources. What makes metadata so effective for discovering information are standards--accepted protocols and rules of metadata use. Many metadata standards are well-known to most librarians and information workers: Dublin Core, MARC, XML, and Z39.50 to name a few. But these general standards need a foundation of more technical implementation-oriented standards to reach their potential. Index Data developers have played--and continue to play--a major role in developing many of these lower level technical standards--standards such as ZeeRex, Zoom and Zthes--that allow the more well-known standards to function so effectively in the real world.

On the right are some links that help illuminate the fundamental importance of metadata and the best ways to employ it for information discovery and management. If you have additional links you would like to see added, please notify us at info@indexdata.com.