Metadata has become in past few years the key element in the world of intellectual property creation and management. Most digital asset and content management system vendors now define their product by its ability to support custom metadata and in particulary Adobe’s XMP metadata technology. Besides being an excellent organizational tool, metadata is the essence of advertising, packaging and medical/financial/governmental record keeping and more. Every time we complete a form, we do so with metadata values in the form fields. Our Internet searches start with metadata keywords and end with information wrapped around and associated with those keywords.
Roszkiewicz, Ron. IDEAlliance (2009). Articles>Information Design>Taxonomy>Metadata