 Hello, and welcome to this session in which I explain the concept of metadata. It's very important to understand what is data first. Data is information that has been gathered and recorded for analysis and interpretation purposes. And data comes in various forms. It can be numbers, text, images, sounds, video files, etc. And we are bombarded with various types of data in the real world. Now, what is metadata? Metadata is a data that provides information about other data. Now, hold on a second. This is practically circular. So metadata is a data that provides information about the data. What does that mean? Well, let's take a look at this image here. Okay, for example, metadata for an image might include the date it was taken, the camera used and the dimension of the image. So believe it or not, my cousin found this image or somehow he was able to get his hand on this image. Now this image is it's all what we know is it was taken April 77. That's all what we know. And this individual here looks like my one of my brothers, I have two brothers that's basically they were close in age. We did not know. So we know the date, we know the time, but we did not know who's in which one of my brothers in this image, why, because we did not have enough metadata. We have that I believe this is either the type of the camera or the type of the film that was used to take the picture. So that's all what we know. Now, so in a broader sense, it can be thought as data about the data, providing more information that makes it easier to find something, manage something, use data and provide context and easier for comparison and analysis. Now the good news is now we know it's April of 1977. We know either the type of the film or type of the camera, the good news is on the back. There was a description, although the description was not complete. We know this was my oldest brother. So that much we know, but we didn't know who the baby was. Was it me? It can be me because I was not born before April of 77. So the point is, if you have this data on the description on the back, we will be able to know the cipher exactly when, who and the location, the location was not taken. So we guessed where the location is. So that's basically metadata about this picture. Before we proceed any further, I have a public announcement about my company, farhatlectures.com. Farhat Accounting Lectures is a supplemental educational tool that's going to help you with your CPA exam preparation, as well as your accounting courses. My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course, such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles. My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses, broken down by chapter and topics. My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true, false questions, as well as exercises. Go ahead, start your free trial today, no obligation, no credit card required. Now we could have metadata about emails. We could have metadata in Excel sheet. For example, in Excel sheet, you could have an about tab before you have other tabs, for example, sales, purchases, so on and so forth. And in this about tab, you can explain what's in the data. In an email, when you send an email, well, you're going to have the most important part of the email is the email itself, the content of the email. But you could have many metadata in the email that has nothing to do with the message itself. For example, the sender's email address is considered a metadata. The recipient is a metadata. They have nothing to do with the message itself. So metadata refers to information about an email message that's not part of the actual content of the message. You could have a subject line, time and date of sending and receiving, size of the email, maybe the server, so on and so forth. Not part of the message itself. So the message itself is the data, but you have information about that data. Because if you look at the message, if you don't know who the sender, who's the recipient, what's the subject line, you may not be able to decipher it. So the metadata gives you information about the data. Now from an accounting perspective, because again, here we are accountant, maybe you're listening to this for the CPA exam or for the CMA exam. An accounting metadata can be used to describe and provide information about the financial data and the transaction that we use in the system. So what could be some examples of metadata that can be used in the accounting field? Well, transaction date, the date that the transaction took place, such as the purchase of a sale. Description of the transaction. What's the purpose of the transaction? Office supplies, salary payment, so on and so forth. The amount is the metadata about the numbers, the monetary value of the transaction. The account information. We have to have account information about the account that we are using. Are we debiting? Are we crediting this account? The classification of the account. Is it an expense? Is it a revenue? Is it an asset? Is it a liability? Now bear in mind, all this metadata is stored in the financial software, in the financial accounting software, or in the financial databases. And it can be used to organize all this financial data and to produce financial statements and reports. So this is how we use the metadata for all of this to be able to ask the system to pull an income statement. We already know that what goes on the income statements is revenue and expenses. The metadata tells the system we are looking at revenues and expenses. Now we could have many revenues, many expenses, but the metadata is revenue and expense. And the classification of it is part of the income statement. So by providing information about financial transaction, metadata can help accountant and finance professional to understand the context of the data and make informed decision. Now we could have many types of metadata and uses in many fields, not only in accounting. We could have descriptive metadata, for example, title, author date. For example, this could be used in a library setting. We could have structural metadata like file format and size. We could have administrative metadata like rights management access control for certain files, technical metadata resolution, color depth. And as I mentioned, it's used in many fields, library, information science, digital asset, contact management and systems, so on and so forth. What should you do now? Whether you are studying for your CPA exam or CMA exam, go to Farhat Lectures and maybe look at additional MCQs. That's gonna help you understand this topic. So you can answer any questions whether you are a CPA candidate or a CMA candidate on the exam day. Good luck everyone, study hard and stay safe.