Metadata Standards
International standards apply to metadata. Much work is being accomplished in the national and international standards communities, especially ANSI (American National Standards Institute) and ISO (International Organization for Standardization) to reach consensus on standardizing metadata and registries.
The core standard is ISO/IEC 11179-1:2004 and subsequent standards (see ISO/IEC 11179). All yet published registrations according to this standard cover just the definition of metadata and do not serve the structuring of metadata storage or retrieval neither any administrative standardisation. It is important to note that this standard refers to metadata as data about containers of data and not to metadata (metacontent) as data about data contents. It should also be noted that this standard describes itself originally as a "data element" registry, describing disembodied data elements, and explicitly disavows the capability of containing complex structures. Thus the original term "data element" is more applicable than the later applied buzzword "metadata".
The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The original set of 15 classic metadata terms, known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set are endorsed in the following standards documents:
- IETF RFC 5013
- ISO Standard 15836-2009
- NISO Standard Z39.85 .
Although not a standard Microformat (also mentionned in the section metadata on the internet below) is a web-based approach to semantic markup which seeks to re-use existing HTML/XHTML tags to convey metadata. Microformat follows XHTML and HTML standards but is not a standard in itself. One advocate of microformats, Tantek Çelik, characterized a problem with alternative approaches:
| “ | Here's a new language we want you to learn, and now you need to output these additional files on your server. It's a hassle. (Microformats) lower the barrier to entry. | ” |
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