Metadata Management

Metadata is an important facet of data entities and sits within the data governance space.  Meta data is data about data. There are various categories of metadata.  

• Business metadata describes all aspects used for governance, finding & understanding data.
• Technical metadata describes the structural aspects of data at design time. 
• Operational metadata describes processing aspects of data at run time.
• Social metadata describes the user perspective of the data by its consumers.

Often metadata connects business domains, processes, technology and data. A good place to start is at the technical layer and a tool such as Microsoft Purview can be useful to make this scalable. The end goal is understandability of the data leading to good data quality.