Preface Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the SCC Mirror Committee (SMC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T). For brevity, this Standard will be referred to as "CAN/CSA-ISO/IEC 11179-1" throughout. This Standard supersedes CAN/CSA-ISO/IEC 11179-1:05 (adopted ISO/IEC 11179-1:2004). At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 11179-1:2015 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA Group will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC. Scope This part of ISO/IEC 11179 provides the means for understanding and associating the individual parts of ISO/IEC 11179 and is the foundation for a conceptual understanding of metadata and metadata registries. This part of ISO/IEC 11179 is applicable to the formulation of data representations, concepts, meanings and relationships to be shared among people and machines, independent of the organization that produces the data. It is not applicable to the physical representation of data as bits and bytes at the machine level. In this part of ISO/IEC 11179 (and all other parts), metadata refers to descriptions of data. It does not contain a general treatment of metadata.