Managing Metadata at the Veterans Health Administration: A Case Study in Sharing a Metadata Registry

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) embarked on a data management program with the development of a Metadata Registry (MDR) to support their data standardization program and to document their diverse applications, from the legacy VistA hospital information system installed and partially customized in approximately 125 VHA hospitals, to a centralized data warehouse environment. The VHA MDR is based on the ISO/IEC 11179 standard for metadata registries, features a new platform-independent java-based user interface for query and data maintenance. VHA is also working to broaden the application to meet the data management needs of the entire VA. The “Registration Authority” component of the ISO metamodel is used to organize and separate the metadata managed by the organizations. This MDR effort will also support standardized terminology at VA and interagency sharing with other federal agencies. This presentation will demonstrate the new MDR interface, made available for reuse by the VHA, and will address:

• The history of the MDR, which is based on the EPA’s Environmental Data Registry,
• The MDR modernization, a new J2EE version that provides database- and platform-independence, supporting 2 registration authorities
• Methods of metadata population, including automated metadata extraction from legacy applications and data warehouses
• How the ISO/IEC 11179 metamodel is used to separate and share metadata between organizations, and to interface with VHA structured terminology sources