Metabase
Metabase
A metabase (sometimes called a metadatabase or metadata repository) is a database for storing descriptions of things. Descriptions can provide the who, what, where, when, and why of an item (e.g., a bird point count) as well as links to the data and sources for more information.
Metadata describes data conceptually to facilitate the understanding, usage, and management of data by humans and/or computers. Metadata may use defined structures (i.e., schema) and keywords to permit complex searches, summaries, sharing and automated updating. Metadata without defined keywords and usage of keywords are analogous to book indexes, while those with defined keywords and keyword usage are analogous to spreadsheets; the former provides a means to search for various records in the repository that may need to be repeated given different spellings and usage of the search terms, while the latter permits more complex queries for combinations of defined keywords as well as summaries of the resulting records.
The metadata required to effectively work with data varies with the type of data, the context of acquisition, and purpose. Often data providers will provide users access to a variety of metadata fields, which can be used individually or in combination, and applied by different users to achieve different goals. These users can be either human end users or computing systems.
Usually it is not possible to distinguish between (plain) data and metadata, and the distinction is largely semantic because information can be data and metadata at the same time. For example, the headline of an article is both its title (metadata) and part of its text (data). Similarly, metadata for a conservation project can include a list of focal species (metadata) that could be grouped with other project metadata to describe the number of projects focusing on a particular species (data).
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