Metadata Management

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What Does Metadata Management Mean?

Metadata management is the administration of metadata in systems. Metadata is often described as data about data and plays key roles in file compression systems and other types of technologies.

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Techopedia Explains Metadata Management

Throughout the broad range of systems that control data sets, metadata often plays the vital role of providing condensed, scaled-down pointers to large data sets, such as image and video files, large text files, or complex sets of files.

In large data centers, metadata helps tag blocks of data so that they can be more easily and scalably moved around in systems. Metadata often helps to eliminate bottlenecks by allowing systems to reference the larger data sets without actually ‘calling’ or assessing those larger data sets.

One way to think about this is to consider metadata a label applied to a box of data. Rather than looking through each box, developers or others can manage these boxes by simply looking at the labels applied to them. Metadata management is becoming ever more important in various areas of technologies such as file storage, cloud computing systems, compression engines, Internet reference systems and much more.

Professionals dealing with metadata are becoming valuable to companies, and credentials related to metadata management are helpful for many types of IT careers.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.