19 Aug 1998. There are presented here, subject to subsequent refinements and changes, in hope of aiding and stimulating further discussion on the ECAI standards and methodologies.
Metadata come in many shapes and flavours.
They constitute essential ingredients of multifaceted apparatus dedicated to efficient distribution, storage, tracing and retrieval of publicly accessible information. Not all metadata tags and annotations, of course, are capable of performing all these six functions by themselves. Hence, an existence of multiple, specialised sets of metadata scattered both within and without the resource in question. There are two major types of metadata in terms of their placement with respect to the resource they annotate Internal - metadata are an integral part of the resource itself. It is possible to access a resource without ever stumbling upon a meta-data set it pertains to.