Findings, questions and recommendations from the ISDA workshop

As in all workshops about digital libraries, there was a great deal of discussion about metadata. It is defined in terms of relationships between data objects, or as searchable data about data; for example cataloging information, call numbers, file names, object ID’s, hyperlinks, ownership records, signatures and other parentage documents. We point out that representations of data, summary data, and other kinds of derived data are not strictly considered to be metadata, for example thumbnail images, graphs and visualizations, power spectra, instrument calibration information. Computers can create these kinds of data automatically, and they can also make records of low-level data descriptors such as file size, and file name, location, timestamps, access control, etc. The more interesting metadata issues concern the semantic content, the ‘meaning’ of the data. Currently, this can only be created by a human mind, and the easiest way to do this is when the data objects are created in the first place. The key here is to create structured documents in a sophisticated markup language such as XML or SGML, or failing that, compliant HTML, with all the tags written in a compliant