Table Of ContentMetadata
Metadata
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The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series
Auctions, Timothy P. Hubbard and Harry J. Paarsch
Understanding Beliefs, Nils J. Nilsson
Computing: A Concise History, Paul Ceruzzi
The Conscious Mind, Zoltan L. Torey
Crowdsourcing, Daren C. Brabham
Free Will, Mark Balaguer
Information and the Modern Corporation, James Cortada
Intellectual Property Strategy, John Palfrey
The Internet of Things, Samuel Greengard
Memes in Digital Culture, Limor Shifman
Metadata, Jeffrey Pomerantz
MOOCs, Jonathan Haber
Open Access, Peter Suber
Paradox, Margaret Cuonzo
Waves, Fred Raichlen
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Metadata
Jeffrey PoMerantz
The MIT Press | Cambridge, Massachusetts | London, England
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© 2015 Jeffrey Pomerantz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by
any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or
information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the
publisher.
MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business
or sales promotional use. For information, please email special_sales@
mitpress.mit.edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press,
1 Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142.
Set in Chaparral Pro by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United
States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pomerantz, Jeffrey, author.
Metadata / Jeffrey Pomerantz.
pages cm.—(The MIT Press essential knowledge series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-52851-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Metadata. 2. Information
organization. I. Title.
Z666.7.P66 2015
025.3—dc23
2015030578
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Preface ix
1 Introduction 1
2 Definitions 19
3 Descriptive Metadata 65
4 Administrative Metadata 93
5 Use Metadata 117
6 Enabling Technologies for Metadata 133
7 The Semantic Web 153
8 The Future of Metadata 187
Glossary 209
Further Readings 215
Figure Credits 223
Bibliography 225
Index 233
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series foreword
The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers acces-
sible, concise, beautifully produced pocket-size books on
topics of current interest. Written by leading thinkers, the
books in this series deliver expert overviews of subjects
that range from the cultural and the historical to the sci-
entific and the technical.
In today’s era of instant information gratification, we
have ready access to opinions, rationalizations, and super-
ficial descriptions. Much harder to come by is the founda-
tional knowledge that informs a principled understanding
of the world. Essential Knowledge books fill that need.
Synthesizing specialized subject matter for nonspecialists
and engaging critical topics through fundamentals, each
of these compact volumes offers readers a point of access
to complex ideas.
Bruce Tidor
Professor of Biological Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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PrefaCe
This book was borne largely out of a massive open online
course (MOOC) that I taught for the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill on the Coursera platform, in the
fall of 2013 and again in the spring of 2014, titled “Meta-
data: Organizing and Discovering Information.” Online
teaching and learning is not a new idea by any means, but
MOOCs focused a great deal of attention on this form of
pedagogy, both inside and outside the academy. I had been
Preface
teaching online for many years when MOOCs hit the news
in 2011, but the sheer scale of a MOOC captured my atten-
tion. I got to thinking about what teaching and learning
in Information Science might look like, if it were entirely
online. I believed then, and still do, that the first course Preface
in any Information Science curriculum should be a course
on metadata: almost everything else in the field depends
on metadata, and the subject provides a hook into most of
the issues in the field. So when Carolina decided to launch
its MOOC initiative, I was very excited to have the oppor-
tunity to launch a course on metadata, to put my ideas to
the test.
I’m very pleased about how well the metadata MOOC
was received. And I’m equally pleased that the course
caused metadata to come to the attention of the editors of
the MIT Press, as a topic worthy of being included in the
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