Metadata standards

Standards are an important mean to achieve common representation schemes and interoperability of system, and hence can play a pivotal role in exploiting metadata[12]. There are very many activities going on area including

• the development of a metadata taxonomy to help structure the discourse on metadata.
• the development of ontologies related to metadata attribute, and description of data elements and domains in terms of naming, typing, classification, and semantics.
• the definition of a meta-model registry structure to achieve mapping among different meta-model, and
• the definition of generic functionality for tools for the development and operation of metadata base.

Here are some organization providing metadata standards :

• The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set is a consensus which represents a simple resource description record that has the potential to provide foundation for electronic bibliography description.These standards are deliberately kept simple and flexible, so that authors can provide metadata by themselves (Simplicity of creation and maintenance), that any Internet document can be described with it (Commonly understood semantics, Extensibility, Interoperability among collections and indexing systems) and that it can be easily adapted into other languages (International scope and applicability). Some of Dublin Core metatags (placed in head section of webpage) are:
  
  • Title the same as that given in the $<$ TITLE $>$ tag
  • Creator person/organization responsible for the intellectual content. LastName, FirstName
  • Description some search engines use this description as the summary of a page in the displayed search results
  • Subject a list of keywords that describe the content of the page
  • Date.Created YYYY-MM-DD
  • Identifier URL of the page. The uniquely identifier for the page.
  etc..

• The ISO 11179 standard addresses the specification and standardization of registration of data elements.
• The Meta Content Format (MCF) addresses the abstraction, standardization and representation of the structures used for organizing information.