There are indeed issues with searching if people aren’t using matching descriptions. Think of someone calling a collection of texts a “text collection”, while someone else might be searching for a “(text) corpus”. A person can also be labelled a “speaker”, “participant”, “actor”, “author”, and so forth. Or think of all the variants that people can use for one and the same country: “the Netherlands”, “Nederland”, “Netherlands”, “Holland”, etc. The same goes for lingustic annotations: “noun” and “substantive” can both be used to describe the same part-of-speech tag. To counter these problems the metadata components contain links to a kind of database that contains atomic concepts (say “country” or “resource type”). Smart software will later on be able to “see” that if a user searches for nouns, he might also be interested in substantives, because they either refer to the same concept, or the concepts are marked as related.