With the rapid growth of the Internet, digital contents have increased in a geometric progression and the types also became much varied. In order to make it easier to identify and search digital contents on the Internet, which is basically a distributed network environment, it is essential to organize and manage metadata. In this study, we have comparatively analyzed the data elements of the meta data formats currently approached from different aspects in diverse fields, so as to provide basic materials for securing interoperability of the meta data formats. We selected Dublin Core, Semantic Header, MARC, IAFA Templates, and TEI Header as the general metadata formats of digital contents used widely in all areas, and we carried out comparisons and analyses based on the literature.