O que você entende por Metadados ou Metadata?

© 2008 J. Paul Getty
Second Edition, 2008, Version 3.0

transcrito e traduzido do site http://www.dspace.org

Metadata ou Metadados, literalmente quer dizer “informações sobre os dados”, e tornou-se largamente utilizado atualmente e normalmente quando é utilizado não é acompanhado das devidas explicações e na maioria dos casos o contexto também não ajuda muito. Faço uma transcrição aqui da entrada no http://www.wikipedia.com a saber:

“Meta é uma preposição clássica do Grego (μετ’ αλλων εταιρων) mais o prefixo (μεταβασις)  dependendo do caso significando quantia, meios de, subjacente a, epistemologicamente falando significa sobre sua própria característica, ou seja informações sobre os dados” .

Termo utilizado por diversas comunidades profissionais de pessoas que desenham, criam, descrevem, preservam e usam sistemas de informação e seus recursos. Refere-se ao modo como os humanos organizam,  classificam, categorizam e atribuem propriedades a qualquer artefato que é armazenado em qualquer tipo de meio eletrônico e com os quais cada vez mais interagimos.

No passado a criação e gerenciamento de metadados foi primeiramente responsável pela formação dos profissionais envolvidos com catalogação, classificação e indexação, mas com o aumento significativo do volume de informação gerada por pessoas comuns, hoje metadados faz parte da vida de todos e não somente dos profissionais de grupos restritos. Todavia metadados não é um termo muito familiar para criadores e consumidores de conteúdos digitais, muito embora nomes de páginas de Web, folclores e redes sociais utilizem metadados.

Crianças e adolescentes bem como os estudantes em geral, lidam com informações sobre o material que recuperam ou armazenam na Web, e isso tem aumentado a importância no adequado entendimento e no papel dos diferentes tipos de metadados visando garantir acesso, autoria, interoperabilidade, escalabilidade e hereditariedade cultural

Schoolchildren and college students are taught in information literacy programs to look for metadata such as provenance and date information in order to ascertain the authoritativeness of information that they retrieve on the Web. Thus it has become more important than ever that not only information professionals but also other creators and users of digital content understand the critical roles of different types of metadata in ensuring accessible, authoritative, interoperable, scaleable, and preservable cultural heritage information and record-keeping systems.

Until the mid-1990s, metadata was a term used primarily by communities involved with the management and interoperability of geospatial data and with data management and systems design and maintenance in general. For these communities, metadata referred to a suite of industry or disciplinary standards as well as additional internal and external documentation and other data necessary for the identification, representation, interoperability, technical management, performance, and use of data contained in an information system.

Perhaps a more useful, “big picture” way of thinking about metadata is as the sum total of what one can say about any information object at any level of aggregation.1 In this context, an information object is anything that can be addressed and manipulated as a discrete entity by a human being or an information system. The object may comprise a single item, it may be an aggregate of many items, or it may be the entire database or record-keeping system. Indeed, in any given instance one can expect to find metadata relevant to any information object existing simultaneously at the item, aggregation, and system levels.
In general, all information objects, regardless of the physical or intellectual form they take, have three features  (content, context, and structure) all of which can and should be reflected through metadata.
• Content relates to what the object contains or is about and is intrinsic to an information object.
• Context indicates the who, what, why, where, and how aspects associated with the object’s creation and is extrinsic to an information object.
• Structure relates to the formal set of associations within or among individual information objects and can be intrinsic or extrinsic or both.

Cultural heritage information professionals such as museum registrars, library catalogers, and archival processors often apply the term metadata to the value-added information that they create to arrange, describe, track, and otherwise enhance access to information objects and the physical collections related to those objects. Such metadata is frequently governed by community-developed and community-fostered standards and best practices in order to ensure quality, consistency, and interoperability.

The following Typology of Data Standards organizes these standards into categories and provides examples of each. Markup languages such as HTML and XML provide a standardized way to structure and express these standards for machine processing, publication, and implementation. Library metadata development has been first and foremost about providing intellectual and physical access to collection materials, and includes indexes, abstracts, and bibliographic records created according to cataloging rules (data content standards) such as the Anglo-1 information object is a digital item or group of items, regardless of type or format, that A can be addressed or manipulated as a single object by a computer. This concept can be confusing in that it can be used to refer both to digital “surrogates” of original objects or items (e.g., digitized images of works of art or material culture, a PDF of an entire book) and to descriptive records relating to objects and/or collections (e.g., catalog records or finding aids).

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