# If anybody can create metadata components, how can you still search through the resulting metadata descriptions?

**URL:** <https://forum.clarin.eu/t/if-anybody-can-create-metadata-components-how-can-you-still-search-through-the-resulting-metadata-descriptions/457>\
**Category:** Metadata\
**Tags:** metadata\
**Created:** [12 September 2024 13:48 UTC](https://forum.clarin.eu/t/if-anybody-can-create-metadata-components-how-can-you-still-search-through-the-resulting-metadata-descriptions/457 "2024-09-12T13:48:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![twagoo](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/forum.clarin.eu/twagoo/32/11_2.png) [@twagoo](https://forum.clarin.eu/u/twagoo)\
**Post date:** [12 September 2024 13:48 UTC](https://forum.clarin.eu/t/if-anybody-can-create-metadata-components-how-can-you-still-search-through-the-resulting-metadata-descriptions/457/1 "2024-09-12T13:48:39Z")

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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.