There's more to the definition of metadata than just 'data about data.' The word 'meta' also means 'story,' so metadata can also mean the story of data. As usually told through information structures like controlled vocabularies, glossaries, thesauri, hierarchies, taxonomies, ontologies, data dictionaries and knowledge graphs, metadata as a story makes data more worldly by enriching data with context, meaning and intelligence.

If datasets were city neighborhoods, metadata would be the streets and houses that the data lived in.