Metadata is, simply put, data about data. It gives us a description and context of what the data is. This allows us to better understand the data that is being presented to us. It also helps us find and organize data, which is super helpful.

I personally love books; they are great for many reasons. One of those reasons is how they can help one understand what metadata is. Let’s take one of my favorite books as an example: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. It is poetic, well-paced, and has a great story. If you’re into mythology, you’ll love it! Anyways, back to metadata. Just from looking at the cover, I am already being given some metadata (information about the book) about the data (the actual story). On the cover, I can see that the book is a New York Times Bestseller and a winner of the Orange Prize for fiction. This is important information about the story that allows us to organize it among other novels.

Other important metadata about the book can be found within the first couple pages. There you can find information about the book’s publisher, the edition of the book, and when it was published. One of the most important pieces of meta data is the ISBN number for the book. This is one of the most important pieces of data about the book because it allows us to find the book from anywhere. This gives a clear idea of why metadata is important to think about in reference to data. How would we be able to find the book in other book databases without the ISBN? Well you probably could, but it would take a long time and would be really annoying. The same situation would occur without metadata.

Meta data can also be analyzed through a word document, something a lot of us use every day. Say you are writing a paper for class. The actual words that you are typing into the document are data. In order for the document to be formatted a certain way, some information must be given in regard to the document (the data you are typing). This information includes the documents properties, such as size, number of words, the document type, tags, even the title. It also includes dates related to the document like when it was created or when it was last edited. All of this information falls under the category of metadata.

Both of these examples are fairly simple. However, this is not the case for all forms of data. Data can become highly detailed and complicated. This is why metadata is so important: It is necessary to make sure that data can be interpreted, analyzed, and processed. In other words, for data to be usable, metadata must be present.