Among other institutions, WAN-IFRA supports what is called the “Embedded Metadata Manifesto” that was initiated by the IPTC.
The IPTC, based in London, UK, is a consortium of the world’s major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards for improved news exchange that are used by virtually every major news organization in the world.
 The Embedded Metadata Manifesto lists five defining principles for the creation and storage of metadata and calls for data to be preserved and read across all media formats and software configurations:
1. Metadata is essential to describe, identify and track digital media and should be applied to all media items which are exchanged as files or by other means such as data streams.
2.  Media file formats should provide the means to embed metadata in ways that can be read and handled by different software systems.
3. Metadata fields, their semantics (including labels on the user interface) and values, should not be changed across metadata formats.
4. Copyright management information metadata must never be removed from the files.
5. Other metadata should only be removed from files by agreement with their copyright holders.
More information can be found on the official Embedded Metadata web site: www.embeddedmetadata.org