Abstract—The need to have standards has always been a priority of all the disciplines in the world. Today, standards such as XML and USB are trying to create a universal interface for their respective areas. The information regarding every family in the discipline addressed, must have a lot in common, known as Metadata. A lot of work has been done in specific domains such as IEEE LOM and MPEG-7 but they do not appeal to the universality of creating Metadata for all entities, where we take an entity (object) as, not restricted to Software Terms. This paper tries to address this problem of universal Metadata Definition which may lead to increase in precision of search. Keywords—Metadata, Standard, Universal, XML. I. INTRODUCTION VERY object must have a definition i.e. some keywords that define its structure and working, thus we can refer to this object through these keywords and a collection of these objects. These objects, even if formed, will also have the same definition. The objects must have some relationships to be of some use i.e. no object is useful in a standalone manner. This brings up an interesting fact that today all forms of objects that exist do not have proper implication of the above definition and by term object we refer to a number of fields such as Hardware, Software, Multimedia and other forms of physical or virtual structures. To define an object one needs to look into the specific details of that object and its relationships. Metadata [1], as defined in the proper sense is a step towards defining the information related to an object. II. BASIC IDEA Today, many forms of objects such as multimedia and software use Metadata to define the structure and information about the media. The problem is with the low usage of a standard that does not really exist in terms of definition and structure. Every field (Hardware, Software, Multimedia and other forms of physical or virtual structures), uses its own way of defining the object in hand. The need is to create a standard metadata definition for each of the fields. Once a user tries to Manuscript received March 31, 2005. Mohib-ur-Rehman is with Muhammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad Campus, Jinnah Avenue (Blue Area) Islamabad, Pakistan (phone: 92-300- 5115672; e-mail: mohib.ur.rehman@ gmail.com). Mohammad Haseeb Anwer is with Muhammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad Campus, Jinnah Avenue (Blue Area) Islamabad, Pakistan (phone: 92-596-541520; e-mail: mhaqs@ hotmail.com). Nadeem Iftikhar is with Muhammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad Campus, Jinnah Avenue (Blue Area) Islamabad, Pakistan (phone: 92-300- 5164815; e-mail: nadeem @ jinnah.edu.pk). find an object of his need he must look into every possible relationship for that term. For Example, A user tries to find a term "audio", this particular term has many ways to it. An audio term can relate to a software, hardware, media, files etc. Thus if he does not know about the relationship between all these aspects, he is mighty sure to be stuck and thus his search is lost. Search engines today such as Google [2] try to bring every possible result to a user's query through minimal possible retries and maximum probability of success. But it does not tell a user what he is searching for. Suppose that the user wanted to search for hardware and wanted to buy it after he came to know about the exact specification of the hardware. The search might not possibly bring him the physical object but can relate links to that hardware. IEEE [3] defined standards about certain media types such as software and multimedia files that are starting to take roots but are not widely used throughout the world. USB [4] is another example of minimizing the amount of brands in the world created by many of the companies. The idea is to give the user a "Z" after processing "A-Y", where “Z” is the common interface such as the USB and “A-Y” is the company’s own design and specification of the hardware, which however does not possibly restrict them. This idea of having something common throughout the lineup of these objects is the basic concept that can help in the creation of metadata based upon common fields and universally accepted standards throughout the world. Universal Metadata Definition Mohib ur Rehman, Mohammad Haseeb Anwer, Nadeem Iftikhar E Term: Audio Hardware Software Media Others Software uses hardware to process audio (APH, SPU) Software plays audio media and process signals (DSP) Media is encoded and structured through algorithms (APA) Figure 1: “Audio” Meta term & Relationships World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology 5 2005 144