Earticle

Metadata is defined as data about data. In large scale distributed and heterogeneous software systems, metadata is considered as one of the most important components for the architecture and construction of information systems. Metadata is utilized to improve communication between heterogeneous information systems – for the purposes of obtaining and providing information, for communication between user client workstations and information servers, and for electronic business between information systems. Metadata management is much challenging and is a hot topic for research at present. In this paper, we review work that deals with effective indexed data for mobile service management metadata in three different points of view. Firstly, we survey some proposals about applying model management to classical metadata problems. Then we inspect how metadata can help managing multimedia data. Finally, we review some mobile service specific metadata management issues. We survey approaches that are of foundational nature as well as those that are application-oriented. We believe that combining both foundational and practical aspects is important to achieve the goal of managing metadata with the same ease as, for example, database management systems have achieved in the management of classical relational data.