What is metadata? 

In simple words metadata is data for the data. Specifically, the metadata is a set of data that provides information about other data. According to the information included, metadata can be divided into several distinct categories: Descriptive, Administrative, Technical, Legal, Structural, Geographical, Temporal and Preservative. Additional types of metadata are related to specific research domains such as: experimental, statistical, analytical, sample metadata, etc. 

Purpose of the metadata 

Metadata provides all the necessary information needed to interpret the data; data reporting. Good metadata enables you to understand, use, and share your own data now and in the future, and helps other researchers discover, access, use, repurpose, and cite your data in the long-term. It also facilitates long-term archival preservation of the data. To provide a complete set of metadata with your data, you need to answer the following questions: 

• When you provide data to someone else, what types of information would you want to include with the data to make them useful? 
• When you receive a dataset from an external project/researcher, what types of details do you want to know about the data? 

Metadata is considered as important as data itself. Also, to make your data FAIR, the FAIR principles need to be applied to both data and metadata. 

Common Metadata Elements 

In the following list you can find the core metadata elements that should be included in a metadata file: 

• Title 
• Creator(s) and Contributor(s) 
• Topic – Subject 
• Description – Abstract 
• Collection period 
• (Geographical) Location 
• References to related works 
• Language 
• License 
• Data Access type 
• Used Standards / Methodologies 
• Keywords – characteristic words or terms that typify and describe the dataset 

Find your Metadata Standard 

For many researchers, if you publish your data to YoDa or Zenodo, you will use the Data Cite v4 standard, and will find the metadata editor built into those sites.  

For GIS data, use the ISO-19115 standard, it is editable within popular GIS software such as QGIS and ArcGIS. 

There are many more metadata standards, and the Faculty of Geosciences has many fields of study. The Research Data Alliance has a directory of metadata standards, you can find the directory at the link below: