Simon Willison’s Weblog

Clever, but I prefer the standard "data about data" for the following reason. Say you have a video of an event. The video is data, not "the thing" or the event. "Metadata is information about a thing, apart from the thing itself." is more ambiguous to me. The video is data and a thing about an event. Is the film metadata? Is the event is a thing. The phrase "data about data" covers all cases simply and clearly... to me.

David Keightley - 19th November 2003 04:53 - #

I still cant understand the difference between metadata and a schema. Is there any difference or are we just trying to compicate matters.

Roger Mutangadura - 24th January 2006 08:24 - #

The difference between meta-data and database schema is an easy one. This i have discovered after some research. A database schema is more of a namespace. Take the example of a Warehouse, its like a huge database with all the products inside like shoes(make, colour and size etc). The shoes section in the warehouse becomes our schema, and the clothes section becomes the other schema all belonging to the same database (warehouse). We then have a catalog that describes the warehouse contents, i.e if we have shoes, what type are they, what colour are they, in which section are they found, the description of the shoes is then the metadata. Here what this all means is that schemas in databases allow us to have virtual databases within one big database, hence we can have the same table name but with different fields, each belonging to two different schemas. The descrption of the tables like the fields, datatypes and constraints is thus the metadata. Submitted By Roger Mutangadura : roger@mirasol.co.za

Roger Mutangadura - 27th January 2006 12:02 - #