Imagine you’re beginning a research project and someone hands you a book. This book has no cover, no title. The entire exterior of the book is blank, save for the canvas material of its hardcover exterior. You open the book and page toward the table of contents, only to find that there isn’t one either. Chapters don’t have headings, either—you have all this information in your hands but no way to sort through it. The book might as well be scraps of paper strewn about, each with a relevant fact you could use in your paper yet there’s no organization leading you through it.
There’s a reason that books have titles, tables of content, and other indicators of what’s inside—it offers the information critical organization, making the book itself an effective tool for research and reviews. Similarly, metadata management takes a disorganized mass of data and offers some a much-needed catalog of what that data is and how it can help a business grow.
What is metadata?
Put simply, metadata is data about data. It describes the data, offering the meaning and organization a company needs to take advantage of the data. Metadata contextualizes the data itself. The most recognizable example of metadata beyond a business context is your Spotify library, a metadata repository of its own.
When you open the app to play a certain song or playlist, you don’t sort through each media file in hopes of finding the particular artist or album. Instead, the songs include metadata—its title, artist, album, and other details. With that information, you can find the song you’re looking for with little to no delay, letting your dance party get started in an instant.
How do you manage metadata?
What is metadata management? Essentially, metadata management is the management of the metadata that in turn describes data. By managing its metadata, a business can discover and utilize the information and value within its data.
Metadata management, then, builds upon the organization started by the metadata itself, taking those details and making sure they’re accessible and therefore usable. If metadata itself is the songs in your Spotify library, then Spotify provides metadata management by ensuring your library has consistency, accuracy, and organization.
Software solutions like TIBCO’s are perhaps the simplest method of metadata management, making the process of developing and maintaining a metadata strategy as effortless as possible. With the right metadata management system, a company’s data governance team can ensure that metadata assets are readily available and able to be put into action.
Why do companies bother managing their metadata?
Without metadata management, a business would spend more time searching through their data catalog than implementing the insights that data provides. Metadata management solutions invite users to open their eyes to just how valuable metadata can be. With the context that metadata management provides, the data gains newfound usability, and the value of that metadata skyrockets.
If a certain sort of data is vital to an organization’s success, it becomes all the more essential to manage its metadata. A consistent metadata management strategy makes the data itself more consistent, maintaining accuracy and quality throughout the company overall.
If you plan to enter the business world, metadata management—and metadata and data management more generally—is a skill that will show that you understand the insights a company needs to thrive and succeed. By recognizing why metadata’s usability, visibility, consistency, and accuracy are critical, you’ll be one step closer to the career of your dreams—and the tools you’d need to take that data, utilize a metadata management system, and guide a company to unprecedented heights.