In the fifth article of the series, industry expert and WhatTheyThink contributor David Zwang continues his discussion about cross-media communications and production, this time with a discussion of metadata and its crucial role in cross-media production workflows. It will look at the basics as well as what you need to know to work in an integrated environment.

We have already established that the past and future of print and eMedia are really contingent on having a variety of types of content available. However, having the content available for collection and packaging it into the required form for distribution can only work if we have a way to identify it. Sure, we could try to use file names like girlwithreddressonbicycle.jpg, and hope that someone will understand or remember its context, ownership and origins, but it really isn't the most practical way to identify content. This problem is only magnified when you increase the amount of content available for a specific use, the relationship of that content to other pieces of content, and then factor that by the number of potential uses and channels. And don't forget that this not only affects conventional print and eMedia production, but variable data print production as well.

According to Wikipedia, Metadata is defined as "data about data." In essence, it is used to describe the characteristics of the content, like a label, although metadata is usually referred to as 'tags'. And while the term meta has Greek roots, metadata can't be used in a salad...but you could always substitute Feta Cheese in a pinch. Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable format, is usually the form this metadata takes. This can be stored in a database where the content object resides, or in the object itself.