Information behind the scenes

Each time more and more, documents we create and handle are in a purely digital format, and we distribute many of them openly. This leads to proliferation and exchange of documents, the origin and authorship of which is often lost. On the other hand, and most importantly, the management of all information in these documents is done in an automated way: indexing, interconnections among documents, analysis, extraction of keywords... In all these processes, the presence of an identification of the author within the text, which is enough for the human reader, is hardly recognisable by the computerised systems and, hence, such information will be lost. This article shares a few suggestions about the chances we have of including this kind of information in our digital documents. The answer to these issues is what has been called metadata: information about information.