Craig Consulting The Information Management Professionals
Meta data
Meta data is information about information. An index or contents page in a text-book are examples.One reason for the apparently poor performance of Internet search engines - the return of huge numbers of irrelevant documents - is that the majority of available information sources have no meta data. Internet search engines rely on meta data entities to help them target documents which are relevant to searcher's area(s) of interest. Where no meta data exists, the search engine must 'read' all possible documents and return those which contain some or all of the search terms. Thus, the poor or confusing returns from Internet searches are due to the inadequacies of the documents posted to the web rather than to the performance of the search engines.
A properly contructed and consistently applied meta data system supports the identification and retrieval of relevant information from, for example, electronic document management systems or Intranet searches.