From couple of days, Mostly I googled with the search keyword “metadata”. I was quite satisfy with the definition like metadata is “Data about Data”, “Documentation of metadata” but I was looking for the ways how one can manage in different scenarios. In short, I found 3 ways two manage it. Here are the techniques 

1. Management of metadata as Tags

Initially people thought that uncontrolled vocabulary will leads into disaster in the system. Along with the Web 2.0, people found it in totally in reverse way. There are lots of social systems which are using the same concepts and successful as well. I thought it is due to following factors.

• Tags are really cheap.
• Different people have different vocabulary for the same words. The words which are more common have more chance in search output.
• Tags are initially not follow any pattern but later people will be focus on some of the tags.
• There are strategies where we can build network of these tags.

Facebook is one the example which use Tags at images which helps user to navigate through the network.

 2. Metadata as Ontologies

I am not expert in building ontologies but after reading some papers; it is possible to build  ontologies on metadata. Building ontologies of metadata is helpful in the following way

• Semantics of metadata
• Existing tools which can search metadata by some semantics.
• Sharing of Ontologies (Really helps between different departments, different research groups)

The other side of Face on Ontologies is that it’s hard to build as compare to Tags.

3. Taxonomy/ Hierarical metadata

I believe, this strategy also works in maintaining the metadata, if hierarchies are predefined and has rare chance to update in breadth dimension.

Basically, it is following the rules of some Schema (Hierarchy) but still it is easy to create (If hierarchies are predefined).