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 a description of contents, a technical description, the context of its creation, 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.