Metadata: a user's view

An analysis is presented of the uses of metadata from four aspects of database operations:(1) search, query, retrieval; (2) ingest, quality control, processing; (3) application to application transfer; (4) storage, archive. Typical degrees of database functionality, ranging from simple file retrieval to interdisciplinary global query with metadatabase-user dialog and involving many distributed autonomous databases, are ranked in approximate order of increasing sophistication of the required knowledge representation. An architecture is outlined for implementing such functionality in many different disciplinary domains utilizing a variety of off the shelf database management subsystems and processor software, each specialized to a different abstract data model. >