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.