What is the purpose of the metadata?
Handles, by themselves, do not describe the resources they identify. Without examining a resource itself, it is not possible to know what the associated handle is. This is the role of metadata – to find out what a resource is without having to inspect it; thus, metadata is important. To ‘discover’ what a handle is, you must know something about the resource. DTIC’s metadata table provides ‘kernel metadata’ – very limited bits of data describing a resource. These key metadata elements make up the metadata database. The metadata database, housed in an Oracle database, is comprised of all metadata kernels for DoD resources that have handles and participate in DTIC’s Handle Service.
