Abstract

As companies and government agencies attempt to integrate their data from multiple sources into single, enterprise-wide views, keeping track of just what data they have and where it is kept is a huge task. Data warehouse technologies and service-oriented architectures, to name but two of the modern-day culprits, have brought home the need for an additional level of repository—one that would keep track of all the others. From this has come the concept of metadata. At a superficial level, the term “metadata” can simply mean “data about data,” but this definition hides considerable subtlety and complexity.