Metadata relationships

Component and descriptive metadata are closely related. In some cases, even the names are the same, but it’s applied to different content.

For example, a particular author may have written all the content for a brochure and therefore the author’s name was associated with all the components that make up the brochure. As the brochure works its way through the creation, revision, approval, publishing, and distribution process, it’s easy to promote that author’s name from the individual components to the categorization or product level. If there’s more than one author, the system can gather them all and roll them up into a list of authors.

Other types of metadata are similar but applied at different levels. Separate creation, revision, and approval dates would be managed and tracked for both the individual components and the final publication. Each of the metadata elements has the same name (Date = Approved, for example), but they’re maintained separately.