Metadata is the contextual information required to understand data—data about data. A value by itself meaningless (e.g., 3) without additional information about the data (e.g., 3 mg). To have relevance, documentation needs to be accompanied by attributes like title, author, date/time stamp, etc. It is structured information that describes, explains or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use or manage data.
To ensure integrity, changes made to document metadata should be tracked and made available for review. Each time a change is made to any metadata, a user must enter a reason for the change so the data stays current. An EQMS helps eliminate the common problem of out-of-sync metadata during a revision process. When a document is revised, updated metadata information such as document number, revision number and basic information about a document is updated as well.
