Overview: Understanding metadata
Metadata fundamentals distinguish descriptive and technical information, its storage location and the rules for choosing among sources.
A title supplied by a provider and a codec reported by a probe describe different aspects of the same item. Embedded and sidecar locations answer another question: where that information was stored. Provenance and precedence then explain why a value was accepted, retained or replaced in the library.
What is metadata?
Metadata records information about a media resource or the work it represents, allowing a library to identify, describe, organize and present it.Descriptive metadata
Descriptive metadata expresses the identity, content and context of a work or resource for discovery and presentation rather than specifying how its samples are decoded.Technical media metadata
Technical media metadata describes the encoded resource, tracks and presentation properties recovered by parsing, probing or analysis.Embedded metadata
Embedded metadata is stored within the media resource's own structure and can describe different scopes such as a file, track, image or catalogue relationship.Sidecar metadata
A metadata sidecar stores associated information outside the media resource, relying on a defined association and schema rather than being part of the image or media payload.Metadata provenance
Metadata provenance records the sources and activities responsible for values or derived resources, making identity, corrections and later refresh results easier to assess.Metadata precedence
Metadata precedence is the field- and operation-dependent policy for selecting among local, provider, derived and edited candidate values.