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Shakewell

Language and Terminology

Metadata

The structured data about a piece of content: what it is, what it applies to, its status and version, used to manage and assemble it.

Definition

What Metadata Means

Metadata is what lets a system act on content without reading it: select every procedural module for a system, find everything affected by a part number change, serve only what applies to a configuration.

It stops being an editorial nicety the moment content is consumed by machines as well as people. A library a model grounds on is only as good as the structure and metadata describing it.

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Beyond the Definition

Knowing what a term means is the easy half. If you need to know what it obligates on your program, that is the conversation we are built for.