Metadata Standards

What is metadata? 

Metadata are 'data about data' and explains the purpose, origin, time references, geographic location, creator, access conditions and terms of use, etc., of a dataset. 

These metadata will draw from the comprehensive documentation of your data you generated during the lifetime of your research project, and allow others to understand, interpret, and re-use your datasets. 

There are many kinds of metadata, each serving a purpose: 

• Metadata that helps identify where the data is coming from (e.g., who created it, title). 
• Different ways of adding metadata to make the data ‘discoverable’ for other researchers. This requires either keywords or ontology terms describing what is in the data. 
• Metadata describing how the data can be re-used, such as license information, and, for data about people, the extent of their consent for data reuse. 
• Metadata that makes the data understandable, e.g., linking to the exact processes used to collect them and units. 
• Metadata describing where the data comes from and what it is useful for. For frequently used data types, there are often very well-defined metadata standards, in other cases you may need to think about this yourself. 

For each of these kinds of metadata there are specific standards. There is no single standard that will get you all the metadata needed to make the data as FAIR as possible. 

Metadata standards can be organised into four general types: 

• Metadata element sets or schema, sometimes called data structure standards, are the categories of data that make up a record or other information object. 
• Controlled vocabularies, sometimes called data value standards, are lists of standardised terms and names used to create metadata. 
• Data content standards are guidelines for inputting values into metadata elements, e.g., date format. 
• Data exchange standards are specifications for encoding data. 

Metadata for a dataset 

For the re-usability of your data, by yourself or others at a later stage, information about how it was collected and how it can be used should be stored with the data. 

Metadata standards 

A metadata standard is a high-level document which establishes a common way of structuring and understanding data and includes principles and implementation issues for using the standard. The standard contains specifications for the minimum information that should be collected about research data for it to be re-used. 

Many research fields have worked together to define what kind of metadata should be collected to describe certain types of data. Standards describe the information that needs to be collected and the format in which it is expected. 

Metadata have specific standards, and these will depend on the type of metadata collected, the intended audience, and specific requirements of the field itself.