Universal Meta Data Models

Written by: David Marco and Mike Jennings

Corporations and government agencies spend billions of dollars annually on information technology (IT) application, hardware, software, and middleware, and the personnel that build and use these applications.  All of these IT “touch points” generate meta data, which these organizations need to effectively manage in order to optimize and efficiently manage this multi-billion-dollar investment.  These corporations are implementing managed meta data environments (MME) to provide a systematic enterprise solution for meta data management.

This book is a follow up to Building and Managing the Meta Data Repository (Wiley, 2000).  All too often, the meta data repository is mistaken for the complete meta data management solutions; however, this is not the case.  The MME is the complete enterprise meta data management solutions, of which a meta data repository is one six MME components.

The first part of this book examines the genesis of the MME, the reasons why it is so vital to all enterprises, and the return on investment (ROI) that it provides.  Chapter 3 offers a series of MME use examples, across several industries, and presents two corporations that have successfully built world-class MME implementations.  The second part of this book presents physical meta data models that tackle the most common meta model implementations and illustrate the fundamental meta modeling techniques, tools and concepts that are a must for any data modeler.  The final chapter combines all of the meta data subject area models into one encompassing enterprise meta model.