Metadata

Key point: Generally regarded as properties on a document, this term has some additional contexts.

“Metadata” is an appropriate term for several concepts in PageSeeder. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to align these concepts behind a single definition. Following are the different PageSeeder applications of this term.

Document metadata

Any information associated with a document that is not part of the content is considered document metadata. Document metadata include the core properties and metadata properties. You can view and edit them in the document info and metadata panel.

Core properties include the title, filename, labels, description, last modified date, etc. They are available on any document, folder, or URL. Some core properties like the title, description or labels can be edited. Others such as the URI ID and media type are readonly because they are generated or updated by PageSeeder automatically.

Metadata properties are defined by administrators in the following templates:

document template – for a specific document type.
media template – for a specific media type.
URL template – for a specific URL type.

They let you specify additional custom properties to the document that extend core properties but are not part of the content.

Document metadata properties are available in the index for searches, and their changes are recorded in the edit history.

Source metadata

Externally defined properties attached to media objects and URLs are referred to as source metadata.

Some media objects include built-in metadata. For example, JPEG images can include EXIF data to provide technical or geolocation information. PageSeeder can extract source metadata from video files, audio files, images, Office documents, and PDF documents.

For developers: For further information, see media types, extraction on the PageSeeder developer’s website.

Some Websites supply additional properties to their pages such as keywords, language, license, feature images, etc. PageSeeder can fetch these properties to prefill some information. You can see them in the URL card.

For developers: In developer view, you can see the source metadata for a media object or a URL, in the metadata tab of the document developer panel.

Except for image dimensions, PageSeeder doesn’t store or index source metadata, so they aren’t available for searches.

However, PageSeeder can use the source metadata so that it can be added to the document as metadata properties. The mapping between source metadata and document metadata is defined in the media template or URL template.

For managers: If the document template changes, media objects and URLs have to be reprocessed. This can be done from the template configuration page.

<metadata> element

In PSML, the <metadata> element is used to contain the metadata properties.

For further information, see element <metadata> in the PSML element reference on the PageSeeder developer’s website.

Metadata level

When the content of a document is a media object instead of PSML, the document level is defined as “metadata”, instead of “portable”.

For further information, see Universal Format in the PSML element reference on the PageSeeder developer’s website.