Defined simply, metadata is data about data. Metadata describes the characteristics of your data sources to App Studio and gives it the information it needs to access those data sources. This insulates you from the need to know how to optimally access the data, so that you can concentrate on using the data for reporting, charting, visualizations, and applications. Examples of metadata components are data type, data location, and data content and information about how to connect to it. Metadata can be generated whenever data is created, acquired, added to, deleted from, or updated in any data source within an enterprise.