Metadata capital: Raising awareness, exploring a new concept

EDITOR'S SUMMARY While the value of information is widely recognized, the next step is recognizing metadata as an economic asset. Generating metadata involves costs in technological and human resources, but failure to generate and use metadata can lead to lost opportunity costs. Metadata activities are ultimately motivated by a drive for return on investment. The view of metadata as capital emphasizes that it has value that can rise with reuse. Metadata capital is defined as an asset that captures contextual knowledge about any information object, is produced by human labor or automated processes and yields a product or facilitates some service and can benefit the public. Expediting reuse of data and metadata is the key to maximizing their value, and early research demonstrates value in the linked open vocabulary environment and in reusing URIs. A collaborative project of the National Consortium for Data Science, the Metadata Capital Initiative, is focusing on the value of metadata through reuse in a big data setting to document its specific contributions to technology methods and intellectual advances.