What is unusual for all who are now engaged in the management of intellectual property is the scope of the computer system within which we have to manage our data - the whole of the Internet. This provides considerable challenges to anyone designing metadata to be used in the network environment. This does not propose that all metadata for intellectual property has to be managed in a single metadata scheme. There are only two types of metadata that can be regarded as well-formed. These are by their nature uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
Identifiers are a specialized type of label, created according to rules, but names nevertheless.
However, the use of a data dictionary avoids the sort of ambiguity that is inherent in natural language, where the same word may have very different meanings dependent on its context. Where precision of meaning is essential, human beings can clarify definition through a process of dialogue. This is not generally the case with computers. The mapping between different metadata schemes may be more or less exact. It may also involve considerable loss of information, or no loss of information at all.