Metatietä

Metatietä is a term used in Finnish information science to describe a conceptual framework for organizing and navigating metadata about digital objects and their relationships within information ecosystems. The name blends the prefix meta- with the Finnish word tietä, suggesting a path through knowledge and metadata rather than a single fixed standard.

Core ideas of metatietä include creating a map-like representation of datasets, artifacts, and services, capturing metadata about sources, provenance, licensing, access conditions, and interrelations. It emphasizes metadata provenance and lineage, quality indicators, and the interoperability of metadata schemas. Rather than enforcing one specific schema, metatietä supports layering multiple schemas (such as Dublin Core, schema.org, or MODS) through an overarching metadata ontology and mapping rules.

In practice, metatietä is discussed in contexts such as digital libraries, archives, research data management, and data catalogs, where researchers and librarians need to discover, evaluate, and reuse digital objects. It provides governance by documenting policies, stewardship roles, and access rights at the meta level, helping to align disparate collections and services across institutions.

Challenges for metatietä include balancing specificity with interoperability, reconciling different metadata standards, ensuring privacy and access controls, and maintaining metadata quality. As digital ecosystems evolve, metatietä aims to offer a coherent navigational layer that complements object-level metadata and supports effective data discovery and reuse.

See also: metadata, data governance, ontology, provenance, data quality, metadata schema, digital libraries.