How Video Works, 3rd Edition

17Metadata and Timecode

The term, metadata, was first coined in 1968 by an American computer scientist, Philip Bagley, who used the term in his technical report, “Extension of Programming Language Concepts.” Since that time, many fields, such as Information Technology, Information Science, Librarianship, and of course the Computer and Video fields, have adopted this term. The prefix, meta, is Greek for “among,” “after,” or “beyond.” In English, meta is used to indicate a concept, which is an abstraction from another concept. So metadata is data developed about other data. It’s often defined simply as “data about data,” or “information about information.”

Types of Metadata

In general, metadata information describes, explains, locates and makes ...