6.2. Metadata quality

Metadata is like the elephant in the room that no one wants to be the first to identify: how did it get there? What’s it going to do? What can we do with it?

Metadata comes from a lot of different actors in the information ecosystem. In some cases, it’s created when you save files in your favorite program. In other cases, other software that touches the files and delivers them to you over the internet annotates the file with metadata. Sometimes, your computer OS will create metadata for your file.