Metadata management
IBM® InfoSphere® Information Analyzer provides the data-driven creation of metadata and a way to link the metadata to physical objects.
IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog provides the foundation for creating business-driven semantics, including categories and terms. Using IBM InfoSphere Information Analyzer, you can enhance and extend the semantic information.
For example, you might want to manage information about metadata when you need to create a policy or contact, or clarify the meaning of a table, file, or other data source. InfoSphere Information Analyzer allows you to see the actual data content and validate that the metadata descriptions are correct. When you clarify the meaning of a data source, you make the analytical terms in your metadata easier for users to understand. For example, the field CUST_NBR_1 does not have an explicit definition. To define the meaning of this field, you can add a definition to the field in your metadata. In this example, the CUST_NBR_1 field contains information about customer numbers. To clarify the meaning of the field, you can add a definition that explains that the field contains customer numbers.
You can manage metadata to store corporate-standard business terms and descriptions that reflect the language of the business users. Organizations institutionalizing formal data management or data governance can publish these terms as a way to ensure that all business users have a consistent mental model of the organization's available information based on standard business definitions.
- Database
- A database is the source from which your metadata is imported into the metadata repository. A database contains tables, files, directories, and data fields.
- Tables or files
- A table or file contains metadata that you can import into the metadata repository.
- Data fields
- A data field or column is an individual piece of data such as a name, order number, or address.
- Contacts
- A contact contains personal information such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers of users. Creating a contact does not create a user account in the system. However, the project administrator might use contact information to make decisions when assigning user roles to the project. A contact might also be a person who is associated with specific data. For example, one user might be the contact for account information while another user might be the contact for customer information such as names and addresses. You can add contacts to a database, table, file, and data field.
- Policies
- A policy is typically a document that defines business guidelines or standards such as security regulations. You can add policy references to a database, table, file, and data field.
- Terms
- A term is a business definition that becomes a part of the InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog vocabulary and classification system. For example, if your data contains information about a bank, you might create a term called Bank Customer that describes the data about customers. You can create terms to assign to assets that are implemented data resources. You can assign a term to a database, database table, database column, data file, or data file field. Terms that are defined in InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog are available in InfoSphere Information Analyzer and vice versa. Terms are visible only if you have the appropriate InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog roles.