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# Introduction to metadata management

## Understanding metadata and its importance

Metadata provides information about data itself, like what it is, what it's for, and how it's organized. It also includes information about the business and technical processes related to the data, and the connections between different pieces of data.

Managing metadata well helps an organization understand and control its operations, systems, and how work gets done. This is important for making the most of the data you have and sometimes it's even required by law.

If you don't manage metadata properly, you might end up with messy and confusing data. It would be like trying to find a specific book in a library without a catalog; you wouldn't know where to start looking, or even if the book is there.

In summary, metadata tells you what data you have and helps you find and use it effectively. Otherwise, it can be hard to make sense of all the information you have.

## Challenges and solutions

One of the biggest challenges is in implementing a metadata management strategy that unifies the way you describe, manage, map, and discover your data assets. Critical to the success of strategy implementation is a mutual understanding of the strategy between business parties, a controlled data flow, and a solid definition of high-quality data.

EBX®'s metadata management capabilities ensure end-to-end management so you can govern, master, map, and exchange data. Using the features included in the EBX® Metadata Management application, you can implement:

- A Data catalog: helps you document your information system by classifying your data sources. The goal is to achieve a well-defined view of your information system through different lenses: technical, business, and data specialists profiles. When you document and map your data, you can identify and bridge potential gaps. This allow users to find the data they need, when they need it.

- A Business glossary: allows you to document business terms, their definitions, and the relationships between terms. A unified vocabulary facilitates communication in your organization by supplying a common understanding of business concepts. Issues solved by creating a business glossary include: an inconsistent business vocabulary, data redundancy and duplication, data freshness, and data quality.

- Metadata management: ensures that you obtain value from data by using metadata to inventory, assess and analyze data assets. For example, you can analyze metadata and data for potential added value such as identification and capture of additional metadata or datasets. In other words, it can help you capture data you might not realize you have. Metadata management enhances the experience that users have while interacting with business solutions or products. This creates a collaborative experience and ensures that different types of users find the appropriate virtual environment in which to work.

## Audience

The EBX® Metadata Management application can address the needs of the most diverse organizations and facilitate collaboration across teams. Business users, data architects, data engineers, data stewards, analysts, application architects, application owners, etc. are provided with collaborative workflows. EBX® uses profiles to support role-based access which ensures appropriate exposure of key data elements and provides needed compliance.

## Approaches to metadata management

There are two main types of approaches to metadata management with EBX®:

- Bottom up examples: starting with mapping out the information system, a metadata catalog initialization or an application owner who wants to retro-document their application.

- Top down examples: the Architecture Board launches an information system cartography project, from the business/applicative architecture to the technical architecture.

## Where to go from here

It is important to understand the Key terms used in the documentation. If you are a business user, you might want to familiarize yourself with an overview of the User interface components and how to use some of the generic features. If you are an administrator, you might benefit from understanding the configuration options available to administrators.

Documentation > User Guide > EBX® Metadata Management