Quantifying and measuring metadata completeness

Completeness of metadata is one of the most essential characteristics of their quality. An incomplete metadata record is a record of degraded quality. Existing approaches to measure metadata completeness limit their scope in counting the existence of values in fields, regardless of the metadata hierarchy as defined in international standards. Such a traditional approach overlooks several issues that need to be taken into account. This paper presents a fine-grained metrics system for measuring metadata completeness, based on field completeness. A metadata field is considered to be a container of multiple pieces of information. In this regard, the proposed system is capable of following the hierarchy of metadata as it is set by the metadata schema and admeasuring the effect of multiple values of multivalued fields. An application of the proposed metrics system, after being configured according to specific user requirements, to measure completeness of a real-world set of metadata is demonstrated. The results prove its ability to assess the sufficiency of metadata to describe a resource and provide targeted measures of completeness throughout the metadata hierarchy.