Lifecycle management of data is becoming a very important issue, since proper lifecycle management will influence the accessibility and re-usability of data over years. Lifecycle management includes a number of aspects such as taking care of preserving identity, integrity and authenticity of data, of data curation, of creating metadata to capture contextual and provenance information, etc. Increasingly often data objects are not created by manual operations anymore, but by algorithms that automatically operate on existing data objects. For all creation acts – be it manual or automatic – it is of crucial importance to consider lifecycle management aspects from the beginning, i.e. in particular to create metadata.

In both cases it means extra work for the software developers or data creators, resulting in large delays of the creation of metadata descriptions. But [Beagrie 2001] showed convincingly that shifting the creation of metadata to a later point in time would be much more costly compared to doing it immediately.

	Tip
	We can only recommend starting with metadata considerations and with the creation of metadata descriptions as early as possible.