Metadata

BIM for Heritage, Developing the Asset Information Model, published by Historic England in January 2020, defines metadata as: ‘Data that describes other data and facilitates the re-use and long-term preservation of 3D survey datasets.’

Environmental Archaeology, A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Methods, from Sampling and Recovery to Post-excavation (second edition), published by English Heritage (now Historic England) in 2011, defines metadata as: ‘…data about data eg resolution of an image, file type, percentages derived from original counts of items.’

The Geospatial Glossary, published by the Geospatial Commission, and accessed on 17 September 2022, defines metadata as: ‘Data about data or a service. Metadata is the documentation of data. In human-readable form, it has primarily been used as information to enable the manager or user to understand, compare and interchange the content of the described data set. In the Web Services context, XML-encoded (machine-readable and human-readable) metadata stored in catalogs and registries enables services to use those catalogs and registries to find data and services.’

Smart Building Overlay to the RIBA Plan of Work, published by the RIBA in 2024, states: ‘Metadata is the summary and the description about your data that is used to classify, organise, label, and understand data, making sorting and searching for data much easier.’