What are meta data and standards of meta data? What are their uses?

Meta data are structured data that contain additional pieces of information on a specific ressource. This can be for example a description of contents, a technical description, the context of its creation or relations to other sources and works.

Due to different disciplines having different requirements for meta data, different standards have emerged (e.g. the „Ecological Metadata Language“ and the „Gene Ontology“ for biology). Metadata provide a standardized, machine-readable description that makes finding, referencing and using research data later on possible.