Familiarity with and use of metadata formats and metadata registries amongst those working in diverse professional communities within the informationsector

Metadata registries are considered to be a solution to the problem of data sharing and standardising of information on the Internet. The International Organization for Information recognised the need for a standardised approa ch to this problem and produced ISO/ IEC 11179 Information Technology - - S pecification and standardisation of data elements. As part of an ongoing re search project on the ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registries implementation a qu estionnaire survey was carried out on four discussion lists and the EU fund ed SCHEMAS 2nd workshop (23-24th November 2000). Results from this survey, which was essentially aiming to identify how familiar people were with meta data and metadata registries, are presented along with a brief introduction to the ISO/IEC 11179 Information Technology - Specification and standardis ation of data elements standard.