To better understand all the information available in your enterprise and unleash its full value, you need context. Metadata provides this crucial element, allowing you to better understand your data’s quality, relevance, and value.
Metadata helps you discover data, understand data relationships, track how data is used, and assess the value and risks associated with its use. As data continues to grow at an explosive rate and become more distributed, these are turning into mission-critical processes—which is why metadata management now plays a central, strategic role in driving digital transformation.
Metadata becomes even more valuable if it is active—overlaid with machine learning, augmented with human knowledge, and integrated. It makes the wider data management processes intelligent and dynamic. Active metadata can be the vital foundation of a well-architected data management system, yielding benefits across the entire lifecycle of data projects. For example, metadata can highlight missing, incorrect, or anomalous data. By tapping into the metadata, your systems can automatically correct and enrich the data feeding into a report, avoiding costly errors and enhancing the quality of the analytics to improve decision making.
Informatica’s metadata management approach is designed to help enterprises fully harness the value of all their data with active metadata. Informatica Metadata Management allows enterprises to start this journey by tapping into four major categories of metadata:
Metadata in these four categories becomes the basis for a common metadata foundation. Informatica Metadata Management uses a rich set of capabilities to create this shared foundation:
By gathering technical, business, operational, and usage metadata, Informatica creates a knowledge graph of an enterprise’s data assets and their relationships. We make this metadata graph active by applying AI and machine learning and integrating it with all of our data management solutions.
Active metadata serves as the unifying foundation for Informatica’s Intelligent Data Platform, an integrated and modular platform that allows you to grow and evolve at your own speed, while enabling you to address all of your data management requirements. It fuels the intelligence in the CLAIRE™ engine, the industry’s first metadata-driven artificial intelligence, to accelerate and automate core data management and governance processes. CLAIRE leverages metadata to automatically discover data domains, classify data, identify similar data and other data relationships, recommend next-best actions, and associate business terms with physical datasets.
By making an intelligent data catalog a core part of your data infrastructure, you can ensure that active metadata is integrated into all your data management processes. Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog helps you capture enterprise-wide metadata and turn it into active metadata using extensive connectors that scan and index metadata augmented with intelligence from CLAIRE. Active metadata adds automation and makes it easier and more efficient for users to build, deploy, and operate data management applications for analytics, data science, governance, and any other data-driven business priority.
Here are a few ways Informatica’s active metadata management approach delivers value across the data management lifecycle: