I don’t know whether it’s my increasing knowledge of content-management systems, databases and the like, or if the usage of this term is indeed on the rise, but lately I seem to be seeing the word ‘metadata’ everywhere.

What is metadata? Briefly, it’s data that explains how a particular chunk of data—a file, for example—fits into some more general organisational scheme. An mp3 file, for example, might have metadata saying who recorded it, who composed it, and when, and what genre the song is. A blog post might have metadata about the author, publication date, and the number of comments on that article.

So far, so uncontroversial. Clearly this kind of data is important and useful. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that we cannot properly comprehend the meaning of a piece of data without viewing it through the lens of its attached metadata. What’s my problem, then? Pretty simple: we already have an excellent term meaning just what metadata does, and it doesn’t sound so stupid.

The name of this term? Context. If you want to be long-winded, you can use ‘contextual information’, but it means pretty much the same. ‘Metadata’ is a redundant term that people employ simply because they want to sound cool, to sound cutting-edge, to sound like technologists. It’s just PR, and pretty crap PR at that. It adds nothing of value to the discourse; in fact, it devalues it, by replacing a simple and elegant term (that we’re all pretty sure of the meaning of) with a vague buzzword.