The best metadata management tools can connect all the different definitions of a key attribute in your enterprise systems and provide consistent context, control, and discovery for business users. They will also help you understand the impact of changing one attribute across your entire data landscape. This is important because it allows you to build a comprehensive, accurate data model that meets all your requirements for governance and compliance.

Metadata is the information about your digital assets that describes how they are used and where they come from. It can be a key component of a larger Data Governance program and can enable business intelligence and self-service analytics. In addition, well-managed metadata helps ensure data quality and consistency, supports the integration of new technologies such as IoT and AI and improves the discovery of dataset relationships.

Choosing the Right Tool

The first step is to establish clear goals for metadata management, which can include improving discoverability, enhancing collaboration, standardizing data definitions and/or ensuring governance and compliance. It’s also important to identify the capabilities and features that you need from your metadata management tool, such as scalability and search functionality.

Look for a metadata management tool that can extract and store all types of metadata and that supports multiple languages and formats. It should be able to create catalogs of all your metadata and allow you to categorize it according to your business processes and risk and regulatory requirements. It should also be able to support the mapping of your logical and conceptual data models.