Metadata Types
The metadata application is manyfold covering a large variety of fields of application there are nothing but specialised and well accepted models to specify types of metadata. Bretheron & Singley (1994) distinguish between two distinct classes: structural/control metadata and guide metadata. Structural metadata is used to describe the structure of computer systems such as tables, columns and indexes. Guide metadata is used to help humans find specific items and is usually expressed as a set of keywords in a natural language. According to Ralph Kimball metadata can be divided into 2 similar categories—Technical metadata and Business metadata. Technical metadata correspond to internal metadata, business metadata to external metadata. Kimball adds a third category named Process metadata. On the other hand, NISO distinguishes between three types of metadata: descriptive, structural and administrative. Descriptive metadata is the information used to search and locate an object such as title, author, subjects, keywords, publisher; structural metadata gives a description of how the components of the object are organised; and administrative metadata refers to the technical information including file type. Two sub-types of administrative metadata are rights management metadata and preservation metadata.
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