These data feeds moved around the
company in a point-to-point fashion without much concern for the integration or reuse at an
enterprise level. Many of the major functions that metadata can provide revolve around the
integration of technology assets. Projects like a data warehouse or Enterprise Application
Integration (EAI) provided excellent opportunities to push the metadata philosophy into
the main stream of information management. Today, service oriented architecture (SOA)
and the push toward a Web-enabled environment provide a great deal of opportunity for
integrating metadata at the enterprise level.
Metadata has traditionally been defined as ???data about data??? or ???information about information???.
P?¶yry, Pelto-Aho, and Juha Puustj?¤rvi (2002) define metadata as a discipline that is
descriptive and classifying information about an object. Metadata describes data, information,
and knowledge within various levels of context (Tannenbaum, 2001). Today, with the
advent of technologies such as hypermedia and heuristically-based searching and indexing,
a new, broader, more generic definition of metadata is needed. This definition should include
the traditional concepts, but it should add the concepts of existence, perspective, modeling,
and topicality.
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