Where does the value of a crawled metadata property come from?

Question

I have little to no experience with SharePoint and am working on an ASP.NET website that uses SharePoint for search by calling a SharePoint web service. From snooping around, I've been able to determine that some basic web pages (a sitemap) exist that contain URLs to pages with real content. SharePoint has been configured to crawl these basic web pages.

For searches, scopes are used. The scopes reference a property called "colDatatype". In the Metadata properties, "colDatatype" is defined as DATATYPE(Text).

I can't find any documentation on DATATYPE(Text). In the sitemap web pages I cannot see any values that look like they feed into this property. Where does the values for this property come from?

Answer 1

The metadata comes from the meta tags in the pages linked from the sitemap. DATATYPE is the name of a meta tag and TEXT is the data type.

The meta tag was defined as:

<meta name="DataType" content="bla bla bla...." />