Hi Bryan,
What is data and what is metadata has no relation to being digital or not. There was data and metadata long before there were computers.
Again, we are coming back to this communication problem. I agree with you in the context of the words "data" and "metadata" as most of us probably define them. But we are talking about LSIDs, and so we should follow the definitions of these words in the context of the LSID spec. It may be terribly unfortunate that the LSID spec defines "data" differently from how most of us would use that word -- just as it is terribly unfortunate that a "named concept" has essentially nothing to do with either a taxon "concept" or a taxon "name", or that a "Class" written in C++ has no relationship to the "Class" Mammalia, or that a data "type" has nothing to do with a "type" specimen, or the fact that all of these "homonyms" cause problems that are different from the sorts of problems created by taxonomic "homonyms" -- among dozens of other frustrating language barriers we have.
However, in the context of LSIDs, which is what we are now discussing, the word "data" does indeed unambiguously refer to a digital/binary bytestream, and *not* the kind of "data" that Galileo collected.
Aloha, Rich