Metadata Research - Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Perspectives

Metadata is argued to be a necessity of for the design, implementation and integration of systems in complex data management environments. However, practice experience shows that the implementation of metadata layers is often cumbersome, costly, and fails due to lack of understanding of the involved complexities. Academic research rarely studies the implementation of metadata and so far has little to offer with addressing the challenges. Our recent research explores different perspectives of metadata in an attempt to understand the challenges. In our presentation, we will introduce a few recent research efforts.

Metadata literature offers a vague picture as for what metadata is. and what system and usage functionalities it addresses. Our research provides a useful taxonomy of metadata components in the data warehousing environment, highlighting the complexities involved and providing a powerful framework for metadata examination.

Metadata implementation challenges of metadata implementations are. discussed in the context of the metadata repository, a centralized organizational management of metadata components. We study factors that contribute to the challenge, and the drawbacks of commercial tools with providing the proper technological infrastructure for an integrated metadata solution.

We further investigate the potential usefulness of metadata to. business-users. Two relatively new metadata concepts - quality and process metadata - are empirically explored, and we demonstrate how the inclusion of such elements in end-user front-ends may improve their trust in the provided data and their decision making outcome.