metadata management

Metadata management deals with the structured storage and management of metadata, i.e. for"data about data".

If metadata are stored in memories with short access times, while the user data are stored in mass memories with longer access times, metadata management can be used to determine the relationships between metadata and user data in the shortest possible time.

Metadata management should be extremely flexible and support the rapid retrieval of user data. To make searching for the user data unproblematic, the metadata repositories must be structured, categorized, and consistent, and should have as few redundancies as possible. In this context, the search and retrieval of user data is simplified by tagging. Extensive tagging of user data, for example of a photo or video, is extremely helpful when searching for people or for investigative work.