ISO/IEC 11179 specifies the kind and quality of metadata necessary to describe data, and it specifies the management and administration of that metadata in a metadata registry (MDR). It applies to the formulation of data representations, concepts, meanings, and relationships between them to be shared among people and machines, independent of the organization that produces the data. It does not apply to the physical representation of data as bits and bytes at the machine level.

In ISO/IEC 11179, metadata refers to descriptions of data. ISO/IEC 11179 does not contain a general treatment of metadata. ISO/IEC 11179-1:2004 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.