Familiarity with and use of metadata formats and metadata registries amongst those working in diverse professional communities within the information sector

Metadata registries are considered to be a solution to the problem of data sharing and standardising of information on the Internet. The International Organization for Information recognised the need for a standardised approach to this problem and produced ISO/ IEC 11179 Information Technology - - Specification and standardisation of data elements. As part of an ongoing research project on the ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registries implementation a questionnaire survey was carried out on four discussion lists and the EU funded SCHEMAS 2nd workshop (23-24th November 2000). Results from this survey, which was essentially aiming to identify how familiar people were with metadata and metadata registries, are presented along with a brief introduction to the ISO/IEC 11179 Information Technology - Specification and standardisation of data elements standard.