Metadata management tools provide context, meaning and usability for the growing trove of data a company gathers. They enable organizations to scale their business intelligence and analytics capabilities with greater speed and agility, improve data compliance with regulations and policies and ensure the integrity of information for more confident decision making.

Effective metadata management includes data descriptions, data lineage and the ability to understand and describe relationships between datasets. It also enables organizations to assess and measure the impact of changes to data on downstream data consumers. Moreover, well-managed metadata makes digital assets more accessible to business users for self-service analytics and business intelligence.

The best metadata management tools harvest (extract) metadata across an organization’s asset landscape and then automatically classify, catalogue, visualize and link it to data sets. They also provide an enterprise-wide catalog of digital information, which enables business users to search for data using text-based queries and receive contextual results. They can also be used to document business glossaries, data governance rules and access controls in a single platform.

For example, the solution MANTA from Informatica provides a unified data lineage platform that shows how your data flows throughout your enterprise. It can identify data domains, parse and infer relationships, recommend next transformations and even suggest metadata enhancements through automated machine learning. Its CLAIRE AI Engine allows it to perform advanced scanning and intelligent parsing of metadata across data sources, applications and code (statistical, mainframe and data science) including stored procedures. The solution can also scan the entire database and discover the most critical data for immediate discovery, as well as support data quality rules via its predictive model.