Data and Metadata

Data and Metadata#

The interesting questions asked over and over are:

  • what is data?

  • what is metadata?

It is not an easy task to answer such questions.
The answers are multiple and vary depending on who is answering, their background and domain knowledge.

Literature definition#

According to the literature ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]), data and metadata are often defined as follows:

Data#

Data are raw and unorganized measurements or facts that have been observed at a specific point in time.

Metadata#

Metadata is data about data, or data that provides information about the data. Their purpose is to better explain how such data has been acquired, to provide additional information that was not available at experimental time and add key descriptors to make the data easier to find.

Our definition#

We, at ESS and as SciCat users/adopters, have decided to adopt slightly modified definitions that are better suited to our technical set-up. We also embraced all the latest technological advancements in data acquisition where more and more information is produced, acquired, and stored digitally and the boundaries between data and metadata, according to the previous definitions has become less and less clear.

Our new definitions are:

Data#

Data are every measurement, time series and piece of information, quantitative and qualitative, including log book entries, that can be digitally acquired and recorded during the experimental time while acquiring the data. Such information is saved in one or multiple files which are generated during the experimental data acquisition.

With this definition, we can clearly infer that what we now call data includes what originally was defined as data and also most of what was defined as metadata.

Metadata#

Metadata are any information saved in the data catalogue and readily available to the user to search the individual dataset or a group of them and their linked data.
Metadata can be:

  1. a duplicate of any piece of data contained in the linked data files. The dimension of such values must be small both in size and dimensionality.

  2. any derived information that results from any type of data aggregation (like average, min, max or something more complex) performed on information contained in the linked data files

  3. any qualitative or quantitative information that has been collected or discovered at a later stage, which is relevant to better describe and facilitate finding the dataset itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data Data
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata Metadata
[1] https://zeenea.com/the-difference-between-metadata-data/ What is the difference between metadata and Data?
[2] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-data-and-metadata/ Difference between Data and Metadata
[3] https://dataedo.com/blog/data-vs-metadata Data vs Metadata - do you know the difference?

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