Paul Courtney's List: Social and Behavioral Metadata

Eager to facilitate data communication between organizations and software systems, and to improve the quality of statistical documentation provided to users of data, the data archive community has developed a set of metadata standards. These metadata standards provide a structured framework for organizing and disseminating information on the content and structure of statistical information. To take full advantage of the web technology, most standards are defined in the XML language. The Data Documentation Initiative specification (or DDI) is a standard dedicated to the documentation of microdata. The Dublin Core provides a standard for the documentation of related resources.