“Determine the thing that can and shall be done and then we shall find the way.” — Abraham Lincoln

Metadata – The backbone of your project

Metadata – The backbone of your project

According to the data warehouse project roadmap described in an earlier post, defining and collecting metadata comes after analysis and the definition of guidelines and standards.

A comprehensive set of metadata helps greatly in the capturing of requirements and leads to a consistent process model.

I set the last sentence in bold characters, because it really contains a bold statement!

As I’m going to discuss in this and the following posts, it really pays off to invest in the definition and collection of as many metadata as possible. The definition of different types of metadata determines different sections of the process model. Filling the data step by step not only sketches out a path along the process model, but also can help to assess the current state of the project.

Eventually, project definition, management, and control mainly narrows down to the pursuit of a full set of metadata.

This post sets the stage for a whole series of posts covering metadata. The goal is to define all the data that is necessary to fully represent the components of the data warehouse project and the process model.
I’m going to do this without any claim to comprehensiveness and it would be great, if many of you would take part in a lively discussion. We really strive for a set of metadata that is as complete as possible. Nevertheless, the data I will present at least have guided me through numerous data warehouse projects so far.

In the next post, I’ll start with the probably most important metadata: Data about people.

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