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Table 1 – Comparison and analysis of common metadata standards

Applicable Type User Purpose

Works of art, Provide art categorization,
architecture, other Art historians, art
CDWA material culture, groups information professionals, make information of diverse
systems both more compatible
and collections of works, and information providers
and related images and more accessible

Works of visual culture as Description of works of visual
VRA Art collection organization
well as the images culture as well as the images
Anyone, including experts,
DC Online resources academics, students and Resource discovery
library staff
Share of geographic data, maps,
Government, research
FGDC Digital geospatial data and online services through an
institute, and company
online portal
Identify, locate, and describe
publicly available Federal
Federal information
GILS Government information resources, including
resources
electronic information
resources

Materials, including letters,
Archival and manuscript Archives and manuscripts
EAD diaries, photographs, drawings,
collections at Harvard libraries
printed material, and objects
Libraries, museums, A set of guidelines that specify
publishers, and individual encoding methods for machine‐
TEI Electronic text scholars to present texts for readable texts, chiefly in the
online research, teaching, humanities, social sciences, and
and preservation linguistics

Within open data initiatives/communities, metadata is used to support the description of data sets
(including data services), as well as documents and applications. Only if metadata structure and
meaning are sufficiently uniform or self‐explanatory, a central portal can be realized, to consolidate
various data offers and the contents of existing external metadata catalogs. The implementation of
consistent metadata in SSC is often driven by public decision‐makers, data providers, developers
and other open data initiatives, or application requirements. Metadata can be the foundation of
resource description that can facilitate a shared understanding across business and technical
domains. Metadata focuses on the essentials along with great flexibility without wasting time to
process and understand the described data. For that reason, making metadata machine readable
greatly increases its utility, but requires more detailed open standardization.

5.2 Linked data

Linked data primarily describes the result of consistently applying semantic web principles and
technologies when publishing structured data that allows metadata to be connected and enriched,
so that different representations of the same content can be found, and links made between related
resources. It builds upon standard web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but rather than
using them to serve web pages for human readers, which extends them to share information in a

704 ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications