Metadatahave

Metadatahave is a term used in information science and data governance to describe a practice or framework for attaching metadata about metadata—the descriptive information that documents data assets. In this sense, it acts as meta-metadata, recording provenance, versioning, access rights, quality indicators, and lineage of the metadata itself. The concept is not standardized and appears primarily in discussions about improving searchability, trust, and interoperability of data catalogs and repositories.

Origin and terminology: The term appears in late 2010s and early 2020s discourse and is not associated with a formal standard. It is often presented as a complement to conventional metadata, which describes data, file formats, and content, by adding the governance and lifecycle context to the metadata layer.

Core concepts: Key elements of metadatahave include provenance (where metadata came from and who created it), versioning and change history, licensing and usage rights, quality indicators (completeness, accuracy), validity constraints, and lineage showing how metadata relates to the underlying data, datasets, and systems.

Applications: Metadatahave can support data catalogs, digital libraries, research data management platforms, and archival systems by providing richer context for discovering, evaluating, and reusing data. It enables better auditing, compliance reporting, and automated quality checks when integrated with metadata standards and controlled vocabularies.

Challenges: Efforts to adopt metadatahave face lack of standard definitions, potential metadata bloat, and increased maintenance costs. Privacy concerns may arise when metadata includes access or ownership details, and interoperability requires careful alignment with existing metadata schemas and ontologies.

See also: metadata, data provenance, metadata quality, data catalog, information governance.