The simple answer to the question ‘what is metadata?’ is ‘data about data’. But that answer conceals so much rich detail about metadata. A bit like the analogy of the iceberg, the answer gives you the tip, but not the deep understanding of metadata that data professionals need in order to address the bigger question of data value.

Metadata has some early origins in the world of book publishing: who wrote it, when was it written, who published it and when, the territorial rights for publishing, who holds the copyright, how many chapters it contains, the subject matter and so on. If you look at a listing of a book on Amazon and scroll down a little you will see the metadata; in fact, the whole Amazon page is built from metadata about the book. The book is the data point; all the other information on the Amazon web page is metadata. Here is part of the metadata from Amazon for our first book, The Chief Data Officer's Playbook:

Astonishing! It even goes down to the physical dimensions of the book. All of these pieces of metadata are important to different groups of people who probably have very different motivations and needs. The shipper or carrier is interested in the physical size of the book, the stockist is interested in the language, the foreign rights publishers too are interested in the current languages, the library and retailers are interested in the ISBN and prospective readers are interested in the customer reviews.