Model Catalogue - Metadata Registry
- David Milward
- Adam Milward
The Model Catalogue is a web-based framework for model driven engineering, it will extend to Object Oriented modeling, automated code generation and workflows in time.
The core component of the Model Catalogue is the Metadata Registry.
Firstly what is metadata? Metadata can be defined as "data about data"
There is an International Standard defining Metadata Registries - ISO11179 and in it part 1 defines a metadata, datum, designation and value as follows:
Metadata
Metadata is defined precisely as "descriptive data about an object". Thus, metadata is a kind of data. Data becomes metadata when the descriptive relationship is revealed between the data (now metadata) and the target object(s). Metadata that is the same for more than one object is metadata for a class of objects, e.g., this metadata would apply to an object-oriented class, a datatype, XML schema, etc., is of particular interest because the class of objects might have shared commonalities in computational models and/or semantics.
Metadata itself is modeled as attributes, which are comprised of:
— characteristics
— property values (with respect to the characteristics)
— identifiers (that name the characteristics)
— datatypes (computational description of characteristics-properties)
— codings (symbols used to represent the property values).
In essence this metadata will tell us how the data is stored, what it's context is, what it is related to, and ideally how and where we can use it. It doesn't actually tell us what the data is, for instance the metadata may well tell us that a company holds information about it's employees in a particular format in a) a MySQL database and in b) an HR department spreadsheet. It can also tell us that the database may store a value for the employees telephone number, but that the HR spreadsheet does not, however it doesn't tell us the details of the employees held on these two data-sets.
Why do you need a Metadata Registry?
A Metadata Registry provide the ability to :
- Administer and manage diverse data-sets by centrally controlling the content and versioning of data-sets.
- Ensure data consistency between different platforms and systems
- Ensure data interoperability between systems
- Compare & analyse different data-sets from different legacy projects
- Automatically ensure data consistency in new applications and projects
The Metadata Registry built into the Model Catalogue will provide all these features, and make them available through REST interfaces to other Model Catalogue components as well as to external systems.
With every small department in an enterprise holding data in many diverse databases and systems a metadata registry is the most convenient means of identifying what data is held where.
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