History of metadata

It is well documented that Jack E. Meyers coined the term ‘metadata’ in 1969 and it was first printed in a product brochure in 1973.

Myers proposed ‘data-about-data’ that was the origination of this concept. The term was registered in 1986 as a trademark of the Metadata Company, which provides software and services related to medicine and health care.

The first published use of the word in the sense of data about data may have been in the first edition of NASA’s Directory Interchange Format Manual published in 1988.

Metadata facilitates discovery of relevant information, helps in organizing electronic resources, facilitates interoperability and legacy, resource integration, provide digital identification and support archiving and preservation.

In general computational terms, metadata handles and locates this ‘other data’ in more efficient way so that the bulk of the other data does not have to be processed.

By the early 1990s, the term metadata was being used in the sense of the information necessary to make computer useful to humans, particularly in relation to scientific, social science and geospatial datasets.
History of metadata