Metadata in Science Publishing

In the design of authoring systems in electronic publishing a great challenge is to what extent the author is able, can be enabled and is willing to structure the contribution her/himself. After all, all information that is denotated properly in the writing stage enhances the retrievability later on. Metadata are the crucial ingredients. Hence, prior to design and experiment is the need for a full-fledged understanding of metadata. In this contribution we discuss an attempt to classify metadata according to type and use and elaborate on the many complicated and unsolved issues. The message of all this is that metadata should be treated on equal footing as the objects they describe, in other words metadata are information objects in themselves. We show that all issues that pertain to information objects also pertain to metadata.