Utilizing Metadata: Trends that Will Shape the Future of Metadata Management

If there's one thing businesses have learned in the past decade, it is that metadata is king. Metadata management is becoming more critical for companies with each passing day. 

Why? Well, organizations leverage metadata insights to optimize their processes, products, and services.

We are in an era that requires businesses to work with critical metadata. As such, we identified how metadata can be used and the trends that will shape the future of metadata management:  

How Metadata Can be Used

Companies and metadata managers can make use of metadata in a variety of ways. The uses of metadata are based on their types. Although there may be numerous types of metadata, they all fall into five major categories, which are administrative, descriptive, preservation, technical, and use metadata. That being said, metadata can be put to the following uses.

1. Administrative Uses

Metadata can be used to manage and administer collections of data and other information resources. Examples of administrative use of metadata are:

• The information on how to locate or retrieve data.
• Documentation of the access requirements of certain (usually classified) data.
• Documentation of the rights to reuse data.
• The information on the source of data collection or how it was gathered.

2. Preservation Uses

This type of metadata is used for the information on how certain resources or information are preserved. Before you believe a story of what happened 5,000 years ago, you need to verify how the story was gotten and how it was preserved to prevent modifications. You need to be sure of the originality of the historical data resources. Examples of preservation use of metadata are:

• The documentation of the physical conditions of collected resources. This is important for companies that store products and materials for a long time. In case the current condition of the materials is different from the documented conditions, you may question the usability or validity of the resources.
• Documentations of the steps taken to preserve the resources. 
• Documentation of the changes that have taken place during preservation.

3. Descriptive Uses

You can use metadata to describe data sets or other resources. This helps with data analyses and retrieval. As a business owner, you may need to analyze certain data to make important business decisions. That’s why you need to understand every data set that you come across, how the data is sourced, and what the data is all about. Examples of this type of metadata are:

• Curatorial information
• Annotations
• Special indexes
• Differentiating a version of datasets from others
• Cataloging

4. Technical Uses

As its name implies, some metadata are used to give technical information about some assets or datasets. This type of metadata is usually not meant for casual readers. It is meant for experts in certain fields. Examples are software documentation and security data.

5. Metadata for Uses

This category of metadata can be used to give information on how datasets or other information resources have been put to use and can be put to use. Some pundits have opined that this one is still under descriptive use of metadata. Good examples are circulation records, search logs, and user tracking.

Now that we have discussed how metadata can be put to use, let’s also talk about the current and future trends of metadata management. 

The Trends That Will Shape the Use of Metadata Management 

1. Business-Oriented Metadata Creation

The creation and management of metadata are now more business-focused than before. Most organization and metadata managers are diverting their resources into proper metadata for business data. Huge corporations like Bloomberg have metadata teams that assess metadata of all their digital assets to ensure that it (metadata) gives proper information about assets. Once you scan through the metadata, you should be able to tell if the data is what you want or not. You should also be able to tell how the data can be of benefit to the company that owns the digital assets.

2. Keyword-Rich Metadata

Before now, companies focused on only the content of web pages to rank for certain keywords. Now, the bar has been raised to include the metadata. This is because Google bots tend to crawl digital resources with relevant keywords in their metadata before the ones without keyword-rich metadata.

Besides, someone searching a particular keyword on Google is more likely to click the link with the searched keyword in its metadata than the links without the searched keywords in their metadata. In other words, keyword-rich metadata boosts click-through rates (CTR).

3. Measuring Data Quality

Another notable trend is that more metadata managers attach importance to the quality of datasets. The digital assets with higher quality get metadata first. And the ones with low quality are either given metadata last or discarded completely. 

This is a welcome development because if metadata managers get it right, you’ll no longer spend hours searching the internet to get the information you’re searching for. In fact, you may no longer need to get to the third search engine return page before you get what you want.

4. Access Restrictions

Not every piece of data should be accessible to the general public. So, internal metadata should include who should have access to what information. That way, web developers will make only some web pages of an organization’s website accessible to everyone. Other web pages should require passwords to access them. 

The big picture here is to protect organizations’ classified information and to protect the data of the customers/clients in adherence to GDPR’s data protection regulations. 

5. Realtime Change in Metadata

Data is usually modified or updated regularly, and that makes data get stale very quickly. So, metadata should change as data changes. Have you ever clicked a link returned by Google after a search only to get a message that the page cannot be found? It happens often. The obsolete metadata wasn’t updated or deleted. And it misled you to a page that no longer exists. 

Giving real-time updates to metadata will help to mitigate the problem tremendously. This can be achieved by automating the creation, modification, and update of metadata to all digital assets. 

6. Localization of Digital Assets

It is a new trend for every webpage of a company’s website to have its unique metadata. And some smart organizations and metadata marketers have taken it a step higher by localizing the metadata. That way, the metadata you’ll see depends on your physical location. 

As an illustration, a webpage may display the following search engine metadata in England – “The best sneakers below £20.” When a similar keyword is searched in the United States, the same webpage could be returned with the metadata – “The best sneakers below $20.”

Wrapping Up

We don’t need more evidence than we already have to know that we are experiencing a data boom. Now, more than ever, there is a need matched with the capacity to gather and analyze data. 

Metadata management is the future and companies must prepare for it. The trends listed in this post are vital in helping companies achieve a competitive advantage in the future.