Metadata is what describes your data. It's the label on your containers that tells you which one contains sugar or salt. It's the card that the valet gives you when you park your vehicle at the shopping mall. In the world of tech, it includes information such as the author of a file, file size, time of creation, last updated, etc., (basic metadata elements). Most of this data has remained passive for the longest time (just storing data in a static catalog), leaving the wealth of data insights it can generate unexplored.