Metadata
"data about data"
Metadata elements for on-line documents and other informational objects may be defined. (Note: many UTHSC-H documents have yet to be labeled with appropriate metadata elements.) For example, metadata elements for an HTML document may include:
- title,
- creator,
- publisher,
- publisher component,
- description,
- keywords,
- URL (uniform resource locator),
- date created,
- date modified,
- date expires, and
- full-word index for searching.
When metadata for a collection of data is contained within a searchable
"database", search engines can be used to locate data objects
that meet specific search criteria. For example, documents can be searched
where
- "title" contains "Artificial Intelligence"
- "creator" contains "Jane E. Doe"
- "keyword" contains "web"
- "publisher" contains "The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston"
- "description" contains "search agents"
- "full text" contains "Semantic Web"
Conducting this focused search would return a listing of only those objects that met the search criteria. (For more information regarding the use of metadata, refer to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.)