Definition: Data Documentation and Metadata
The documentation of research data serves to provide a detailed description of the data with the aim of making it discoverable and thus reusable.
Metadata are structured information about resources – such as books, documents, collection objects, or (archived) research data – and serve to provide a standardized description. They facilitate the search, discovery, and reuse of these resources. The type and format of metadata used depend on the academic discipline and, where applicable, the requirements of funding agencies and archives/repositories.
Metadata standards ensure the structured description of resources by providing standardized fields for descriptions, such as for photographs: location, date, photographer, condition, etc. These standards enable the linkage and exchange of metadata between various applications, such as catalogs or search portals, thereby supporting interoperabilityInteroperability is the ability of a system to work seamlessly with other systems. In interoperable systems, data can be automatically combined and exchanged with other datasets, making data machine-readable, interpretable, and comparable in a simplified and accelerated manner. Interoperability is one of the main criteria of the FAIR Principles (Forschungsdaten.info, 2023). Read More.