At the most basic definition, metadata simply describes
objects where the level of detail, utility, and functionality varies from one implementation
to another.
The background section will establish a foundation of past implementations of metadata
where value has been defined by various organizations and academic research efforts. The
emerging world of enterprise metadata will be reviewed where the enterprise semantic meta-
Stephens
Copyright ?© 2007, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission
of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.
data model opens the door to universal acceptance of this technology. In addition, terms used
within the metadata environment will be defined in order to gain a greater understanding of
the environment. Finally, we will describe why this chapter is critical to the deployment of
a large-scale Web environment based on SOA standards.
Metadata.and.the.Data.Warehouse
According to Bill Inmon (1996), the father of the data warehouse, a warehouse is a subjectoriented,
integrated, time-variant, and nonvolatile collection of data supporting management??™s
decision-making process. Generally, the warehouse is populated from a collection of data
sources with an extraction, transform, and load (ETL) tool.
Pages:
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121