Markup and Metadata: Assignment 3
Metadata provides the information which makes your digital library accessible and useful. When a user searches for information in a digital library the results they get depend on metadata. Metadata is usually information related to a document in a digital library and covers such topics as author, title, file size, etc.
Markup is metadata which is used by a processing system to display a digital library. It is a specific set of code words which are used to make sense of the library (including the other metadata contained therein) and display it in a (hopefully) functional way.
XML is a type of metadata commonly used and widely understood.
Metadata is created in the digital library by the person who initially creates the digital document (hopefully). That metadata then stays with the document no matter where it goes. Markup is created by the librarian (sometimes using a helpful program) to make the metadata display in a useful way for the user. It is a process of coding (or having a program do the coding) so that basic machines will be able to understand the code and create something more clear than lines of xml.