6. Metadata Conventions

Metadata have been often proposed to help in organizing data, managing document effectively and obtain better results with search engines. Data that do not have accompanying metadata are often hard to find, difficult to access, troublesome to integrate, and perplexing to understand or interpret. Furthermore, as time passes, undocumented data may lose their value and relevant memories can dissolve without trace.

Metadata is structured data describing facts about documents, in such a way as to help users make sense of their content, their relationships and their history. Careful decisions about which structured data to use for describing which facts about documents determine the identification of metadata schemas, or, under some circumstances, ontologies. Metadata and ontologies are a way of organizing data about data, or information used to retrieve information, in such a way as to help in organizing, understanding and searching facts within huge quantities of documents.

Metadata provide improved reliability of searches, support for workflow processes, data filtering, support for inventory of what information any organization holds, inter-organizational consistency in describing shared facts and documents, interoperability and long-term organization memory.

The Dublin Core is probably the most widespread and famous schema for metadata structures as applied to electronic documents. Yet, its generality limits the flexibility of metadata for the scopes and extent of applications internal to an organization. For this reason, many metadata schemas build over the Dublin Core, but at the same time they actually extend it for purposes of local interest only. Far more interesting appear to be initiatives such as the one sponsored by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), called Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf), which tries to capture several different natures in documents, such as the persistent characteristics of different versions of the same document, as expressed in the WORK/EXPRESSION/MANIFESTATION/ITEM specification.

It is also important to mention the recent Semantic Web initiative: within the World Wide Web Consortium the Semantic Web is a new initiative, heavily backed up by the director of W3C itself, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, aimed at providing software with the features to "understand" documents, rather than simply "display" them. The idea behind the Semantic Web is to create sophisticated applications that can derive new knowledge and exhibit complex behaviour based on formalized statements about the content of the documents, and expressed in terms of metadata accompanying the documents themselves.