Assets need a metadata description to be discoverable by consumers. This metadata description informs application consumers about the content of the application, as well as its location, author, usage policy, The metadata descriptions make the search for the infrastructure components easier and user-friendly by giving the opportunity for the user to retrieve the infrastructure services by searching for the metadata (e.g., keywords in the description, the author/publisher of the infrastructure, the compute power of the provided infrastructure, …) https://confluence.simplprogramme.eu/display/SIMPL/Annex+6+-+Architecture+building+blocks Resources (data, application and infrastructure) need a metadata description to be discoverable by consumers. This metadata description informs consumers about the content of the resource, as well as its location, author, usage policy, etc.