What someone can do with metadata is find, organize, understand and manage the data better, but metadata can also be exploited and used for tracking, profiling and security risks, which reveals details such as who, when, where and how the data was created or shared, from photo locations and even email origins to file types as well as software that was used, which can aid both legitimate analysis and also aid malicious attacks.
For organization and discovery, metadata can be used for search and retrieval to find specific documents, images, or even videos using keywords, dates or even authors embedded within them.
For data management, metadata can be used to catalog datasets, track data lineage, "flow", understand data quality and manage access controls and for content enrichment, metadata can be used to automatically tag photos with faces, locations or themes and make large libraries searchable.
For analysis and insights, metadata can be used for data profiling and understanding data structure, types and schemas, for usage analytics to see how often a dataset is used, by whom, and for what purpose and for business intelligence, metadata can be used to combine metadata across platforms to understand user habits, interests and trends.
And for security and forensics, metadata can be used for cybersecurity to reconstruct attack timelines, trace file origins and identify vulnerabilities by analyzing file metadata, metadata can also be used for digital forensics for use as digital evidence to solve crimes or investigate incidents and for risk mitigation to identify sensitive information like author names or tracked changes, in documents before sharing.
And when metadata is used for malicious use, the metadata can be used for doxing and privacy, by revealing your location from photos or personal details from documents, which lead to doxing and harassment.
Attackers can also use your metadata for targeted attacks like software versions of metadata to craft specific exploits.
Governments and entities can use metadata to monitor communication patterns, "who talks to whom, when" even if content is encrypted.
And extortionists can use leaked metadata, to shame victims.
An example of metadata is in webpages, metadata is used in HTML tags, such as title and description tags, helps the search engines like Google to understand and rank a website's content.
The three types of metadata are descriptive metadata, structural metadata and administrative metadata.
Descriptive metadata, is a type of metadata that provides basic information to identify and describe a resource like it's title, keywords, author and abstract.
Structural metadata is a type of metadata, which shows how a resource is organized and it's structure, like the order of pages in an e-book or even the tables that are in a database.
And administrative metadata, is a type of metadata that includes technical and rights information, like file type, creation date, usage rights, access controls and ownership.
Metadata is used to describe, explain, locate or otherwise make data easier to retrieve, use or manage.
Metadata is often used to manually add tags, keywords or other details to files or webpages through the data's properties or by embedding of meta tags in website code.
You can also use metadata through automated systems and templates to apply metadata consistently across a large amount of data.
Metadata is used for helping you find data or information and helps by explaining, locating and making it easier to find and manage information.
The meaning of metadata is "data about data".
Metadata is basically "data about data" that describes, explains, locates or otherwise makes it easier to find and manage an information resource.
The metadata also provides structure and context, such as an author of a document, the date of a photo or even the file type of a digital asset.
Without the metadata, a data set can be impossible to use or even confusing to use.
Examples of metadata include.
In webpages, metadata that is used in HTML tags, such as title and description tags, helps the search engines like Google to understand and rank a website's content.
In emails, the metadata includes the sender, the recipient, the subject line and the date and the time the message was sent.
In photo's a digital photo contains metadata like the me and date that the photo was taken, the camera model and GPS location.
And in books, the meta data includes the title, author, publisher and publication date, which are all metadata that help you find an understand a book.