10.1 What Is Metadata ?
10.1 What Is Metadata ? Metadata is important. No organization knows this better than NASA; they learned the hard way. The second Martian Explorer crashed because of metadata. It seems that the development team was working with the English system of measures and the flight team was working with metric. When it came time to land, the flight team fired the engines at the wrong time and the probe crashed. The story goes to prove that numbers in and of themselves are meaningless. Quite often we discuss numbers so freely that we forget that numbers are like words. They are merely representations of a concept. The numbers are not reality; they simply allow us to express reality. One reason so many children don't understand math is because it is taught as a language without meaning. We run them through multiplication tables and drill them on the operation of the language. At the bottom of the page, we throw a couple of word problems at them to show how to use the numbers in real life. Yet we don't emphasize the meaning behind the language. Then we wonder why children don't get it. For example, 31,536,000. Does this number mean anything to you? Can you do anything with it? Sure you can do some operations on the number, but the results of those operations are no more meaningful to you than the actual number. The number actually represents the number of seconds in a year. Now you can do something meaningful with the number. I gave you the metadata of the number 31,536,000. The traditional definition of metadata is "data about data." I have never found this definition useful, so let's drill down a bit. The prefix meta in the original Greek meant "what comes after." The term metaphysics, for example, came from the original publication of Aristotle's work. The editor put the subject we now call metaphysics in the book after physics, so he named the book metaphysics, the book that comes after physics. We have come to use the prefix meta to mean something that goes beyond. Metaphysics goes beyond normal physics. In the same sense, we can look at the term metadata as something that is the next thing to data, or something that goes beyond the mere data. The novice to metadata typically sees it as little more than formatting information. How are the numbers formatted? Is the data floating-point or integer? If we are working with text data, we concern ourselves with the number of characters in a field. As we can see by the previous example, the presentation of the numeric data provided us with all the information we needed concerning the format of the data. Formatting is only one type of metadata. There is a plethora of metadata on any single piece of data. We can describe metadata as going beyond data in the sense that it provides the data with context. It provides the frame of reference that the simple data lacks. The previous example of 31,536,000 demonstrated the need for context. A number is just a number unless we put something around it to give it meaning. Numbers are just one type of data; text data also needs a frame of reference. Consider the following two pieces of data: Balebail and Prakash. Here we have text data that most assuredly means something, but without the metadata, the meaning of the data is lost. Most readers probably don't recognize this data as a name. In this example, we have both a first name, Prakash, and a last name , Balebail. Without the metadata, this meaning is lost. We can conclude that metadata transcends data. It describes, or provides the context for, the data.  |
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EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 113