Web metadata standards: Observations and prescriptions

Various Web content metadata standards and observations on their development efforts were reviewed. Content metadata standards were built on top of infrastructure standards that standardize metadata representation and exchange. Product metadata standards standardize descriptions of physical products, data, information resources, and documents. A metadata standard should define concepts at a metadata model (M1) layer, which offers relatively low language abstraction. It was suggested that users must be educated and practical tools to support their search and navigation through classification and thesaurus hierarchies must be developed to help ensure metadata success