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to document a claim you have made on a past income tax return. How long
does it take you to find the data to do the verification? The real problem is not
verifying the amount or the date of the transaction in question, the real prob-
lem is in finding the check or the checkbook where the date and the amount
is written down. Figuring out where to look is the biggest problem in under-
standing far-flung and disparate pieces of data. Metadata serves as an index
to point you to the information you need quickly. Without metadata, what
you are looking for could be anywhere. It is metadata that saves you enor-
mous amounts of time when trying to find ...