metaunit

A metaunit is a conceptual construct used to describe the meta-information that accompanies a unit within a system. It acts as a higher-level container for metadata about entities, components, or data items, rather than the items themselves. It defines the surrounding information that makes the content understandable, traceable, and reusable.

Metaunits are characterized by attributes such as identity, scope, provenance, version, permissions, and relationships to other metaunits. They are designed to be modular, composable, and agnostic to the underlying data or behavior they describe. In practice, a metaunit may be serialized as a small object or block within a database, schema, or knowledge graph.

Applications include knowledge graphs and data catalogs, where metaunits model blocks of metadata for data items; software engineering, where they describe meta-information about modules or services; and data lineage, where they record provenance and transformation history.

Important distinctions: a metaunit is not the content it describes but the surrounding information that makes that content understandable, traceable, and reusable. The term is not universally standardized, and its exact definition can vary across domains.

See also: metadata, provenance, ontology, data model.