Metadata / Jeffrey Pomerantz.

Print version record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-232) and index.

Introduction -- Definitions -- Descriptive metadata -- Administrative metadata -- Use metadata -- Enabling technologies for metadata -- The Semantic Web -- The future of metadata.

When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was "only" collecting metadata about phone calls - information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location - and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? In this book, the author offers an introduction to metadata. In the age of ubiquitous computing, metadata has become infrastructural, like the electrical grid or the highway system. We interact with it or generate it every day. It is not, the author explains, just "data about data." It is a means by which the complexity of an object is represented in a simpler form. When metadata does its job well, it fades into the background; people may take it for granted. The author not only explains what metadata is, he also explores why it exists. He distinguishes among different types of metadata - descriptive, administrative, structural, preservation, and use - and examines different users and uses of each type. He discusses the technologies that make modern metadata possible, and he speculates about metadata's future. By the end of the book, readers will see metadata everywhere. Because, the author argues, it's metadata's world, and we are just living in it.--adapted from publisher's description.

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