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Even if you don’t know what metadata is, you use it directly or indirectly in the most diverse everyday situations.
Its concept is not new either, nor is it strictly related to information technology or the Internet.
Therefore, if you have heard about them and have no idea what they are, what they are for, why they are important, today these and other doubts about them will end!
What are data?
Etymologically speaking, data originates from datus and datum, which mean something that is delivered and offered, respectively.
In practice, data is a part or portion of information about something, for example, 8,516,000 km² is data relating to the area of Brazil.
There are demographic data, such as the population (number of people), distribution by age groups, by geographic regions, which in these cases are basically numerical data.
Your personal data is the set of information – not just numeric – about you, such as full name, age, parentage, place of birth, address, etc.
But when all this personal data of a series of people is gathered in a file, it is said that we have a database of people and that it can be in the form of a computer file. But if it’s on one – or even several – sheets of paper, it can still be called a database, even though the nomenclature is usually associated with its digital form.
Books contain data or constitute a diversified database on a theme, with the difference that in this case, the data are organized in such a way as to present information without the need for software.
With this idea of what data is, we can answer the question that brought most of us here.
What is metadata?
Among the many existing definitions, the shortest and that we like the most is the one that defines that metadata – sometimes also called metadata – is data about other data.
It even seems kind of silly to define it like that, but you’ll soon see that it makes perfect sense.
A better understanding of this definition – or indeed any other – involves understanding the main term involved and even a little about its history, evolution and use.
Let’s start with the most significant term – data. That’s why we start by talking a little about what they are…
Let’s imagine one of the oldest forms of data storage and thus how we saw a form of database – the book.
Books have covers and in them there is information such as the name of the book, the author, the publisher, the edition and depending on the case, other information such as the flaps, the back covers and even the first and/or last pages that are not the main content or data relating to what it is about.
They may contain the table of contents, author biography, a preface or prologue, acknowledgments, publisher information, whatever else you can remember. A lot of other data and that refer to the data of the story told in it. So, as we said, data on data!
Even when analyzing the origin, it reinforces our definition, since meta comes from the Greek “metá”, which means “beyond”. Therefore, it would be beyond the data.
Why is metadata important?
As we said, metadata predates digital transformation.
Information such as dates, titles, authors, date of publication, publisher, and subject types are used to organize and help locate book items in a library, so that the librarian does not have to search book by book on the various shelves of the collection. , one that is of interest to a user.
This collection of data from all the books in the library that are essential to your organization is metadata.
In the computer age, and more precisely on an e-commerce site, when visitors search or use a filter to display all copies about automobiles, or who knows gastronomy, they are using metadata related to cars and food, respectively.
That is, these data that separate books into different categories and their respective values (type of subject, publisher, author, etc.), are metadata and help us to locate those that are of interest to us.
In general, it can be said that the importance of metadata is related to:
- Organization and location of data;
- Data identification;
- Data categorization;
- Data recovery;
- Ease of handling data.
If, despite these analogies, you still have doubts about what they are and why they are so useful, resorting to examples of their use should definitely clarify you about them.
8 practical examples of using metadata
Even if in practice most do not treat them as metadata, they are present in the most diverse situations of our daily lives and that many times have nothing to do with the Internet, although technology has helped to make their usefulness much greater than the simple organization of a library’s collection of books.
1. Barcode and QR Code
Barcodes and more recently – not so much – QR Codes, are a way to encode data for quick retrieval.
To continue using the example of books, many – if not all – normally have a barcode on the back cover that corresponds to the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) and that it is nothing more than a numerical series recognized in more than 200 countries, through which it is possible to share metadata of works in different systems.
Currently, many publishers, in addition to the ISBN, also inform a QR Code, which expands the set of data related to the works and allows the person to retrieve different information related to each one when using a reader.
Barcodes and QR Codes are ways to encode and contain metadata.
2. Digital music
Do you listen to music on digital media? Spotify or Deezer? Or do you have a collection of USB sticks or SD cards that you stick in your car stereo or device? Who knows on mobile?
In any case, if the player used to listen to the songs has the ability to display information about each track, such as the name of the song, the album it is part of, the band or interpreter, the track of the album and its cover and even other data such as a 1-5 star rating or the music genre is because there is metadata associated with each digital music file.
In the case of MP3 – among the many audio formats – there is a portion of data called the MP3 Tag and which, according to the standard, allows having dozens of data (author, year of release, title, band, album, etc) for categorization and song information.
Therefore, it is possible to have a series of information about each audio file without having to listen one by one, as well as allowing players with more resources to select songs from a genre, or from albums released in 2010, for example, or any other criteria you wish, as long as there is the corresponding metadata.
3. Websites
You don’t need to know next to nothing about website design to have your own website, thanks to CMSs.
And it is also thanks to them, through the core of the application, that you give a “help” to search engines in the indexing process, informing the titles of the contents of each page, as well as a description.
This is the information that later appears to users when a search is made on search engines.
And if you were suspicious, now you are sure that this information is metadata and that it is inserted in the HTML meta tags, under the names of title (title) and description (description).
But when you also want to pass some instructions or even not allow an internet robot to search and index the content of a page, you can do it through the robots.txt file, which also contains metadata intended for robots.
4. Operating systems
Whether on Windows, Linux, Android or iOS on your smartphone, metadata is essential to organize, locate and use the many files produced.
Every time you use a file manager in any operating system, among the many features they offer, one allows you to view the properties of each file, which may contain data such as date of creation, last modification, last access, type file type, size, software in which it was created and author.
All these data constitute the metadata of the files contained in the operating system.
Contains information about the data of each file, without having to open them, as well as being very important for organization in the different folders of the operating system.
By the way, all good office suites already attach, by default, various metadata to every created file (text, spreadsheet, database, presentation, etc.), but also allow you to edit the properties, adding other information that can be useful in the management and data archiving and even digital signatures, certifying their authenticity.
5. Photos
Smartphones and their increasingly powerful lenses and social networks were responsible for producing a legion of photographers. Everything is always a pretext for a photographic record.
But have you ever wondered how Google Maps knows which photos you’ve taken that relate to the Google assessment you’re filling out that it’s asking you to post?
You were right if you answered that it is thanks to metadata.
In the case of photos and if you had GPS enabled, in addition to the date, time, location data are included in the metadata of the photo.
Likewise, if you’ve done a ride and captured some moments of the adventure, the Strava app attaches each photo to the exact point on the route map. Many apps “make the magic happen” thanks to the same feature.
6. Downloads
Have you ever encountered an error message like “checksum error” when downloading a file?
If so, know that it was because of a metadata.
The checksum is a small code of computed information that deals with the integrity and security of the data, in such a way that if there was a problem in the download and a package was lost and not downloaded, meaning that the file is not complete and/or identical to the existing in the source, it cannot be used.
7. Licenses and copyright
Metadata is also useful for including information on the types of licenses associated with software (freeware or freeware, proprietary software, free software, open source, GNU GPL, etc).
In addition, they can – and often do – contain information about copyright and rights associated with copyright.
Even these features can be used to prevent media playback on certain players and is associated with combating piracy.
8. E-commerce
In addition to the use of metadata on e-commerce sites, which allow you to find the products you are interested in, its usefulness goes further.
When you receive a package of goods, most of them have a label that contains much more than just recipient / buyer data.
There is even a QR Code and other information that many of us do not understand, but which are very useful for the logistics work and which consists of separation, grouping with other deliveries and even the route of who will take the order to its destination. .
It all depends on metadata.
Conclusion
Metadata is an essential resource for organizing and retrieving information quickly, easily and reliably, present in many everyday situations.
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