High-quality metadata can help users discover data and other resources in many ways. Good titles, abstracts, and keywords, along with spatial and temporal extents, go a long way with many search strategies. Adding schema.org metadata to landing pages can also help. A second discovery strategy, more like browsing, comes into play once someone finds something interesting.
The Doe family consists of mother Jane and her son John. Identifying people and relationships is an important function of metadata. The ISO TC211 metadata standards provide a comprehensive framework for many important metadata use cases. Could ISO metadata be used to describe the Doe family? ISO metadata describes objects with types and properties.
The idea that the language we use to talk about things shapes the way we think or can think about those things has been around since the 1800’s and even has a name, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, proposed during 1954.
Many datasets and products are documented using approaches and tools developed by data collectors to support their analysis and understanding. This documentation exists in notebooks, scientific papers, web pages, user guides, word processing documents, spreadsheets, data dictionaries, PDF’s, databases, custom binary and ASCII formats, and almost any other conceivable form, each with associated storage and preservation strategies.