first uses of the metadata word

[djohnson@w3c2.com.au (Dave Johnson)]

Regarding the saga on trademarking the metadata word - we published a paper
in July 1995 which included the following comment on early uses of the word
'metadata'

"Metadata as a word seems to have been around since the late 1980s. The
earliest use of it found to date is in the first edition of NASA's
Directory Interchange Format Manual (NASA, 1988). A literature search on
the term produced some 50 hits; all of these were more recent than 1990 and
many were related to computer systems engineering. The term
meta-information was used in 1986 (Shelley, 1986) in describing information
about information, which for our purposes is the same thing. "

The full text of this paper can be found at
        http://www.spirit.net.au/earthware/Papers/AMF95/Shelley&Johnson.html

We would be very interested in hearing from anyone re earlier uses of the
metadata word but when the challenge was put at one of the Catalogue
Interoperability Workshops (probably in 1996) no-one came up with older
uses of the term

We would also regard the word as generic since the 'meta' qualifier on the
word 'data' does not in itself make it non-generic - it would be like
trademarking the word 'gigabyte' after most of us had started using the
term

Dave Johnson

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