本文档指定了描述包含医学知识的资源的多个元数据元素，主要是作为网络资源提供的数字文档，可从数据库或通过文件传输访问，但也可适用于纸质文档，例如医学文献中的文章。 元数据元素 —？支持对描述资源的重要方面的明确国际理解，例如目的、发行人、预期受众、法律地位和科学背景， —？适用于不同类型的数字资源，例如，来自专业团体共识的建议、政府机构的监管、制药公司的临床试验方案、来自研究小组的科学手稿、针对特定疾病患者的建议、评论文章、， —？可以向包括卫生专业人员以及个人/患者在内的人类读者展示，以及 —？例如支持搜索引擎将匹配限制为特定类型或质量级别的文档。 本文档中定义的元数据元素不用于 —？描述关于单个患者的文档， —？描述资源的医疗内容的详细信息（但可以通过关键字或代码描述内容的一些想法），或 —？规定资源内容的质量标准。

This document specifies a number of metadata elements that describe resources containing medical knowledge, primarily digital documents provided as web resources, accessible from databases or via file transfer, but can be applicable also to paper documents, e.g. articles in the medical literature. The metadata elements —？support unambiguous and international understanding of important aspects to describe a resource, e.g. purpose, issuer, intended audience, legal status and scientific background, —？are applicable to different kinds of digital resources, e.g. recommendation from consensus of a professional group, regulation by a governmental authority, clinical trial protocol from a pharmaceutical company, scientific manuscript from a research group, advice to patients with a specific disease, review article, —？are possible to present to human readers including health professionals as well as individuals/patients, and —？are potentially usable for automatic processing, e.g. to support search engines to restrict matches to documents of a certain type or quality level. The metadata elements defined in this document are not intended to —？describe documents about a single patient, such as medical records, —？describe details of the medical content of the resource (but some idea of the content can be described via keywords or codes), or —？prescribe criteria for the quality of the resource content.