<data> /me't*-day't*/, or combinations of /may'-/ or (Commonwealth) /mee'-/; /-dah't*/ (Or "meta data") Data about data. In data processing, meta-data is definitional data that provides information about or documentation of other data managed within an application or environment. For example, meta-data would document data about {data elements} or attributes, (name, size, data type, etc) and data about records or data structures (length, fields, columns, etc) and data about data (where it is located, how it is associated, ownership, etc.). Meta-data may include descriptive information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of the data. Not to be confused with Metadata. (1997-04-06)

<product> (Note: One unhyphenated word with initial capital; contrast meta data) A word coined by Jack E. Myers to represent current and future lines of products implementing the concepts of his MetaModel, and also to designate his company The Metadata Company that would develop and market those products. A data and publication search performed when Myers coined the term, early in the summer of 1969, did not discover any use either of the word "metadata" or "meta data". Myers used the term in a 1973 product brochure and it is an Incontestable registered U.S. Trademark. (1997-04-06)

Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:

<World-Wide Web> An element, with tag name of "META", expressing meta-data about a given HTML document. HTML standards do not require that documents have META elements; but if META elements occur, they must be inside the document's HEAD element. The META element can be used to identify properties of a document (e.g., author, expiration date, a list of key words, etc.) and assign values to those properties, typically by specifying a NAME attribute (to name the property) and a CONTENT attribute (to assign a value for that property). The HTML 4 specification doesn't standardise particular NAME properties or CONTENT values; but it is conventional to use a "Description" property to convey a short summary of the document, and a "Keywords" property to provide a list of keywords relevant to the document, as in: <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Information from around the world on kumquat farming techniques and current kumquat production and consumption data"> <META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="kumquat, Fortunella"> META elements with HTTP-EQUIV and CONTENT attributes can simulate the effect of HTTP header lines, as in: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Tue, 22 Mar 2000 16:18:35 GMT"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="10; URL=http://foldoc.org/"> Other properties may be application-specific. For example, the {Robots Exclusion (http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots.html)}. standard uses the "robots" property for asserting that the given document should not be indexed by robots, nor should links in it be followed: <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,follow"> (2001-02-07)

META element

Meta elements are tags used in HTML and XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a Web page.

A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies. Meta-analyses can be performed when there are multiple scientific studies addressing the same question, with each individual study reporting measurements that are expected to have some degree of error.

XHTML Meta Data Profiles (XMDP) is a format for defining metadata 'profiles' or formats in a machine-readable fashion, while also enabling people to see a description of the definition visually in a web browser. XMDP definitions are expressed in XHTML (or possibly HTML).

A metamodel or surrogate model is a model of a model, and metamodeling is the process of generating such metamodels. Thus metamodeling or meta-modeling is the analysis, construction and development of the frames, rules, constraints, models and theories applicable and useful for modeling a predefined class of problems.