You have probably heard this word before – METADATA. But if you are not in the industry you may not understand what it means exactly.
In a nut shell, metadata is ‘data about data’. Clear as mud, right?
Metadata has been around long before the digital age. The Dewey Decimal System is metadata, it is data about books/references. It helps to group, find, search and standardized the information you are looking for but not the information itself. If you ever used a filing cabinet; the labels on the draw would be metadata, describing what is in the drawer, and any labeling on the file folders would also be considered metadata. If your file folders were color coded, that would be considered metadata, too. The content within those files would be considered data. In the digital world, data can be a sleuth of things, it could be product information, code, pictures or assets.
Metadata keeps the data organized