Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).

At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 11179-1:2004 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC.

1 Scope

ISO/IEC 11179 specifies the kind and quality of metadata necessary to describe data, and it specifies the management and administration of that metadata in a metadata registry (MDR). It applies to the formulation of data representations, concepts, meanings, and relationships between them to be shared among people and machines, independent of the organization that produces the data. It does not apply to the physical representation of data as bits and bytes at the machine level.

In ISO/IEC 11179, metadata refers to descriptions of data. ISO/IEC 11179 does not contain a general treatment of metadata. This part of ISO/IEC 11179 provides the means for understanding and associating the individual parts and is the foundation for a conceptual understanding of metadata and metadata registries.