Examples of metadata

by Adnan Alam

By Cronkite News Service

Steve Doig, Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, submitted the following examples of metadata to support a friend-of-the-court brief filed in Lake v. City of Phoenix:

Information about a computer file including:

_ History of revisions to the file.
_ Identification of who is managing the file.
_ Description of software used to create the file.

Information for analyzing a dataset including:

_ The layout of the file to help determine the variables in the dataset.
_ The data dictionary, which explains codes and abbreviations that are necessary to understand the variables.
_ The relational architecture identifying how different tables can be combined into common variables in a relational database.