What is Metadata?

Explained

Metadata describes other data—authors, dates, categories, tags. It enables filtering, faceted search, and better organization in RAG and knowledge management systems.

Related terms

• RAG Retrieve relevant documents and use them as context to generate the answer.
• Big Data Large volumes of data requiring specialized tools; feedstock for training AI models.
• Context Engineering Designing what the model sees—retrieval, memory, summaries, and window budgeting.
• Corpus Collection of documents used to train or feed a system (e.g., RAG).
• Data Lake Repository that stores raw data; source for analytics and ML.
• Data Pipeline Automated flow of data from sources to models or applications.