A full set of structured relevant metadata, comprising all relevant elements, describing one information resource. A metadata record can take many forms; as part of the main information resource itself, e.g. the metadata of an XML file a completely separate record held apart from the information resource itself and even in a different format e.g. an automated library catalogue an electronic file held as an extension of the main resource e.g. the ‘format’ files of a Word document
a composite of different types and different schemes that work together to provide information to the user and to the computer aggregators and harvesters that collect the information and make it searchable
a file of information, usually presented as an XML document, which captures the basic characteristics of a data or information resource
a set of attributes, or elements (eg author, title, publisher, date, subject, coverage and the call number or URL specifying the location of the item) required to describe a resource
A syntactically correct representation of the descriptive information (metadata) for an information resource. In the case of Dublin Core, a representation of the Dublin Core elements that has been defined for the resource. The majority of metadata records and record fragments in this document are presented in HTML syntax.
The record of the metadata, information, for a resource. This is similar to the card in a card catalog system. This information is used by the search engine to find results for a query.