Familiarity with and use of metadata formats and metadata registries amongst those working in diverse professional communities within the information sector

Metadata registries are considered to be a solution to the problem of ata sharing and standardising of information on the Internet. The International Organization for Information recognised the need for a standardised approach to this problem and produce ISO/IEC 11179 Information Technology ‐ Specification and standardisation of data elements. As part of an ongoing research project on the ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registries implementation a questionnaire survey was carried out on four discussion lists an the EU funded SCHEMAS 2nd workshop (23‐24th November 2000). Results from this survey, which was essentially aiming to identify how familiar people were with metadata and metadata registries, are presented along with a brief introduction to the ISO/IEC 11179 Information Technology ‐ Specification and standardisation of data elements standard.