Metadata: the Jumbo Data problem?

Colin Beveridge, Freeform Comment

First published: November 2011

A chance conversation about Big Data led me to think about the importance of metadata to effective information exploitation.

Of course, we have long recognised that we create actionable business intelligence and information by attributing meaning and context to data.

We also know that recording our thought-process and rationale for creating information from data can provide valuable insight for future decision-making. That’s why metadata is so important.

And yet descriptive and contextual metadata is too often the metaphorical elephant in the data center, because our systems and databases still tend to be heavily biased towards transactional data capture, consolidation and transformation.

This makes me wonder, do we put sufficient effort into metadata management, or is it a Jumbo problem that we put in the "too difficult" box?

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