The component metadata lifecycle needs a comprehensive infrastructure with systems that cooperate well together. To enable this level of cooperation this document provides in depth descriptions and definitions of what CMDI records, components and their representations in XML look like.

This document describes these XML representations, which enable the flexible construction of interoperable metadata schemas suitable for, but not limited to, describing language resources. The metadata schemas based on these representations can be used to describe resources at different levels of granularity (e.g. descriptions on the collection level or on the level of individual resources).