The MAAT (Metadata Architecture and Application Team) aims to assist collection-based projects of the NDAP in developing metadata mechanisms and services. “Metadata” is the background information associated with objects, and falls into three categories: descriptive, structural, and administrative and offers three levels of interoperability including data structure, content and value. These services characterize digital collections so that resource discovery, retrieval, representation, management, and preservation are optimized.

Currently, the MAAT supports nearly eighty collection-based projects of “the National Digital Archives Program” (NDAP), with a variety of data types, subjects, communities, and functions. The data types include photos, voice, films, rubbings, specimens, rare books, paintings, artifacts, documents, language databases, and dictionaries. The subjects comprise arts and humanities, social sciences, and normal sciences. The communities consist of libraries, museums, archives, and herbariums. The MAAT is responsible for promoting and planning metadata for NDAP. The main objectives, including service and research, are:

I. To develop strategy planning and application of metadata standards.
II. To develop metadata theory, including metadata methodology, knowledge organization and ontology, and so forth.

To this day, the MAAT offers the following services:

• Support for metadata for provision for collection-based projects of the NDAP (e.g. content analysis, selection of metadata standards, metadata system specifications).
• Support for core element sets for Thematic Groups (e.g. zoology, botany, anthropology, archives, and rare books). Thus the metadata within and among Groups will be interoperable.
• Develop Application Guideline/Best Practice of international metadata standards (e.g. CDWA, and EAD).
• Develop a Chinese version of international metadata standards (e.g. CDWA, EAD, and TEI Lite).
• Develop the national metadata standards (e.g. CDWA, EAD, and LOM)