Metadata
Data about data. SPSS stores metadata within it's 'fat' proprietary format (i.e. SAV). This includes formats, display alignment and width, variable and value labels, measure types (i.e. scale), and user missing values.
Display Dictionary
To extract metadata from an SPSS data set, use: display dictionary. This command works on the active data set.
It outputs (within SPSS) three tables:
- data file metadata
- variable metadata
- value label metadata
The parallel for external data files is:
sysfile info file="/path/to/file.sav".