The Significant Role of Metadata for Data Marketplaces

Abstract

With the shift to a data-driven society, data trading takes on a completely new significance. In the future, data marketplaces will be equivalent to other electronic commerce platforms such as Amazon or eBay. Just like any other online marketplace a data marketplace is a platform that enables convenient buying and selling of products--in this case "data". Metadata is data about data. Metadata plays a significant role in data trading, as it serves as an orientation for all involved parties in the data marketplace. A seller who wants to sell their data on the marketplace needs metadata to describe the selling offer, and the buyer can use it to search and identify relevant data. This paper outlines the significance of metadata in data trading on a data marketplace and classifies the levels of metadata. Moreover, in data trading metadata has also a significant role in determining the data quality. In this paper we also discuss the role of metadata in terms of data quality.