When you are listening to music you try to get certain information-Who is the singer? When was the album released? How does it rank? You ask a similar question when reading a book-Who is the author? How many editions have been published so far?
When the audio track or the book is available in digital format the answer to these questions is called metadata. Metadata is the information or description of other data. It helps us understand the nature of data, its relationships, structure, origin, and how they are used. Metadata makes it convenient to search for and manage data. In short, metadata tells you what the data is about.
Types of metadata vary depending on the purpose, size, setup, and quality. Commonly metadata is arranged into three types-descriptive metadata, structural metadata, and administrative metadata.
- Descriptive metadata gives information about the creation of data and what it is about.
- Structural metadata gives information about how the data is organized, its structure, and data relationships.
- Administrative metadata gives information about the origin, type, format, and accessibility of data.
All these types of metadata help you search, identify, collect and trace any data that you are looking for. To make this process seamless metadata management is crucial. Metadata management involves a range of actions, policies, and technology that are employed to collect, store and manage metadata. Its aim is to organize metadata in such a way that it is easily discernible and discoverable. A systematic metadata discovery system is necessary to ensure that the quality, consistency, and accuracy of data are maintained. Systematic metadata management helps business organizations make informed decisions based on data.
Metadata can be curated manually and through an automated system. There are many metadata management tools that help you automate the system of data management. With the right tools, metadata can be explored and utilized to its optimum level. Metadata management can be sped up with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside human expertise.
Some of the best tools and platforms available for the management of metadata are:
Collibra:
Collibra has a Data Intelligence Cloud Platform that keeps a record of the technical metadata of an organization and is able to automate all key aspects of data management. It labels data sets, chalks out relationships between data sets, and tracks their origin, format as well as use. Collibra builds a repository of data that can be browsed and accessed. Business owners can see, analyze, develop workflows and map data here. Collibra’s extensive features include data cataloging, data governance, data privacy, data lineage, data quality assessment, and data monitoring.
Microsoft Azure Data Catalogue:
It is one of the best metadata management tools. It provides easy data storage and data accessibility. Azure Data Catalogue helps in indexing the stored data, improving the search process and data discovery rate. It also provides options to tag and add descriptions about data sets along. It provides a comprehensive record of organization data and assets along with details about businesses and clients. Microsoft Azure also provides documentation and support for a seamless experience with the tool.
Atlan:
Atlan is credited for being one of the most reliable tools in data management using cloud computing. It is one of the best and leading platforms for metadata management. Atlan’s metadata management system has an open API architecture that ensures better connectivity and relationship mapping among data sets. The main features of Atlan are maintaining a data glossary, enabling data discovery, facilitating data governance, and column-level lineage among others. Atlan is favored by users for providing a robust search system, user-friendly interface, seamless data integration, and collaboration, as well as customer service for data vendors. Atlan is also known for helping customers manage data quality and creating customized metadata.
Informatica:
Informatica is one of the market leaders in metadata management. It aims at helping organizations and businesses to get the best value for their data and make optimal use of metadata. This enables the scanning of metadata across organizations including databases, file systems, data science tools, data analytics, and integration tools. It lets you discover and classify data elements. You can also get detailed metadata lineage to help you in technical classification and governance metadata for business use. Informatica is also a cloud-based tool and some of the services it provides are an are-business glossary, change history, classification of data, data lineage, data profiling, and asset rating.
Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management:
Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management helps businesses by letting them integrate metadata from Oracle and third-party data. It also lets users classify and compare different data sets. It is a comprehensive tool for data management and data processing. Oracle Metadata Management is also the better option for those worrying about data security and data privacy. Users often applaud this as a sound tool capable of handling the largest of the data sets. Workflow management while processing and analyzing data, metadata exchange, data lineage, and support are some of the best features that this tool has to offer.
In data science, the importance of metadata cannot be overemphasized. By describing data fed into bid data analytical tools, metadata helps businesses and organizations get systematic, accurate, and speedy analysis of data. With the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI, metadata management is taking a new shift. Big data analytical tools also open a mine of data that can be effectively explored with the help of metadata.
Metadata’s role in the productivity and success of businesses is increasing by cataloging, mapping, modeling, and classifying data to analyze them. Metadata management also lets users comply with regulations while dealing with sensitive data, and maintaining data security and data safety.
Summary:
There are various tools and platforms for metadata management. These tools provide the best practices to store, classify, catalog, define, and rating data. These tools help in understanding data in full context and improve your data’s quality and relevance. An active metadata management tool is essential to curate, manage, and analyze data for use.
