Metadata specifications in context

From the TC 372 Workshop Compendium

Metadata, as the name implies, is data about data. In current usage of the term, the meaning of data is not restricted to digitally encoded information, but can be almost anything.

The concept of metadata became popular about 15 years ago when it was realised that the emerging Word Wide Web with all of its digital objects would need some equivalent to catalogue records. The ensuing development took a different course, however, with free text search engines becoming the major catalogues to the Web. Realising that many digital objects are non-textual and that even a text document is often a poor description of itself, the interest in metadata continued and has increased considerably over the past few years.