Overview:

The MetadataXchange:  is an open-source platform consisting of central “data catalogue” and a number of plugins that allow users to classify and describe the data that exists within their organization.

MetadataXchange makes data:

  • Better understood:
    • Drugs across the world are administered based on a patient's weight. However, the provenance of this information is often lost: is it patient reported? Measured on scales? In kg or lb? Measured recently? Our toolkit allows you to capture this information and share it with users.
  • Better quality:
    • 17,000 Men are Pregnant in the UK: due to incorrectly entered medical codes at British hospitals, thousands of men apparently required obstetric and prenatal exams - this has a financial and planning implication and should is simple to recertify by metadata driven quality checks
  • More interoperable:
    • After a decade of development costing $7 billion the Ariane 5 first launch exploded. The destroyed rocket and its cargo were valued at $500 million. A board of inquiry investigated the causes of the explosion and in two weeks issued a report. It turned out that the cause of the failure was a software error in the inertial reference system. Specifically a 64 bit floating point number relating to the horizontal velocity of the rocket with respect to the platform was converted to a 16 bit signed integer. The number was larger than 32,767, the largest integer store-able in a 16 bit signed integer, and thus the conversion failed.
  • Cheaper to access, use and manage:
    • 79% data analysts time is spent on data logistics. Creating a central catalogue of data within your organisation can cut the time spend on data logistics by over 50%.


MetadataXchange was created by and for:

  • Software developers, who need a central place to find up-to-date definitions and detailed technical requirements for the data they are being asked to us. Once they have completed a project they need a central catalogue to document and publicize their work (e.g. a new API or Database).
  • Testers, who need to assess the quality and compliance of any new application using a single source of truth.
  • Business Analysts, who want to discover if there are existing definitions that can be reused, so that they can avoid re-inventing the wheel wherever possible.
  • Data (quality) analysts and researchers, who want to find what data is available data, what it means and find out how to assess its quality. They often need to understand it’s provenance and how it differs from similar data collected, as well as how to link, map and transform it.
  • Data stewards and owners, who need a central place to identify and allocate data governance roles and responsibilities, as well as record classifications and access policies.
  • Systems architects/engineers, who want to know where data models are being used and whether changes to metadata or reference data will impact upstream and downstream systems.

Creating a central source-of-truth empowers knowledge workers to discover what’s new, understand what’s available and access the data they need when they need it.

To get started please see The Metadata Exchange (MDX)

For some specific how-to aricles please read How-to articles

And to understand the core concepts in the MDX please see Key Concepts