Summary

Metadata is critical to the success of your unified content strategy. It’s more than just data about data; it’s the encoded knowledge of your organization. Metadata can be used to describe the behavior, processes, rules, and structure of data as well as add descriptive information.

Descriptive metadata categorizes your documents and is usually used by content users to retrieve content.

Component metadata identifies your content at the element level and is used by authors to retrieve content components. There are three kinds of component metadata. Metadata for reuse is used to identify the components of content that can be reused in multiple areas. Metadata for retrieval is used to retrieve content. It may consist of metadata for reuse as well as additional retrieval metadata. Metadata for tracking (status) is used to identify the status of your content in a workflow system.