A data catalog inventories and makes critical datasets available through metadata management. This platform informs businesspeople about what dataset assets exist and are related, where to find them, when they appeared, who created them, and how to access them, among other insights. As centralized repositories, data catalogs aim to be relevant to users across an organization, […]
Metadata Management Tools
Metadata management tools are considered an increasingly important part of a data-driven organization’s overall software collection. These tools help businesses make better decisions by providing useful context and insights about their stored data. Metadata management tools can also be used to improve the customer experience and keep customers longer. Additionally, they allow non-technical users to […]
Fundamentals of Metadata Management
Metadata powers effective action on information by providing context, content, and structure. When this information is managed well, data consumers can find and get the correct data they need. As Atlan Prukalpa Sankar states, “Metadata is the glue that can bind the modern data stack together, the layer that will allow increasingly diverse, siloed tools and people to collaborate effectively.” Grasping the […]
How to Govern a Business Glossary
Many people see the dictionary as a thing of unquestionable authority, with words and meanings that rarely change. Likewise, in corporate culture, business leaders often mistake the business glossary – a collection of data-related terms and definitions used within an organization – as being static, straightforward, and simple to develop and maintain. Timothy Mulholland, senior of insights […]
The Business Glossary and Automated Metadata Tools
Automated metadata tools can be used to develop and build business glossaries, graphs, and data catalogs. By eliminating the human factor, metadata errors can be minimized and tasks accomplished much more quickly. Business glossaries act as the foundation for a shared and common language. Automated metadata tools can cut down on the amount of time […]
Five Tips for Telling a Compelling Data Story
Running a business is impossible without data. Data clarifies the facts, revealing insights that help everyone from top executives to front-line employees make better decisions. Nonetheless, it is as much an art as a science to make sense of data and use it to maximum effect. Information overload is one reason. The amount of data […]
Best Practices for Managing a Data Fabric
When data is not viable for integration across systems and processes, business users will seldom have the right coverage of data. If people lack knowledge about data and its importance logically, it often becomes a challenge, which leads to less impactful decisions. A data fabric is an architectural capability that can give organizations a “data […]
Case Study: Executing an Effective Data Strategy
Few tasks are more logistically and technologically daunting than providing air, land, and sea transportation for the U.S. military across the entire world. Yet that is precisely the mission of the United States Transportation Command, or USTRANSCOM. According to a Congressional Research Service report, on any given day USTRANSCOM conducts over 240 air missions, sends […]
What Data Practitioners Need to Know (and Do) About Common Language
“Unless and until all members of a team have a common understanding of the problem, attempts to solve the problem are just so much wasted energy.” –Gerald M. Weinberg [1] In March 2019, one of us (Thomas C. Redman) served as the judge in a mock trial of a data architect (played by Laura Sebastian Coleman) […]
What Is Business Semantics?
Business semantics describes metadata, reconciled to have consistent organizational terms and meanings. While business metadata describes data to enhance business value, business semantics makes up a sub-set of this metadata, the vocabulary. Business semantics can result in a business glossary, but it may take on a combination of different formats. Conceptual data models, data catalogs, […]