The Role of Metadata for Data Warehousing

Abstract

Metadata has been identified as a key success factor in data warehouse projects. It captures all kinds of information necessary to extract, transform and load data from source systems into the data warehouse, and afterwards to use and interpret the data warehouse contents. This paper gives an overview about the role metadata plays for data warehousing and reviews existing standards, commercial solutions and research actions relevant to metadata management. It turns out that an overall solution for managing all metadata in a central or federated repository is still missing regarding a global metadata schema as well as system aspects and interoperability among involved tools producing metadata. The divergence of proposed standards will probably prevent a breakthrough within the near future. 1 Introduction The topic is as old as data exist: metadata have ever been needed to describe the meaning or properties of data with the aim to better understand, manage, and use that data. ...