A survey on metadata for describing and retrieving Internet resources

Abstract

Metadata, or “information that makes data useful,” have been considered by the database community basically as data in dictionaries used to control database management systems operations. More recently, metadata have been used to describe digital resources available across networks. This paper presents a survey of the state of the art concerning the use and importance of metadata, focusing on different standards and models found in the literature, describing how they serve as a basis for integrating heterogeneous resources on the Web and for developing more sophisticated search mechanisms.