IBM announced IBM Metadata Workbench, new data visualization and management software within IBM Information Server designed to deliver important insight about data and speed deployment of SOA, compliance, business intelligence and master data integration projects.
Metadata is information embedded within data that describes its important attributes such as where it originated, what it means, where it has been, and how it can be used. It is becoming an increasingly important element of compliance initiatives, information integration efforts and electronic discovery for the Web.
To help IT and business users better manage their growing reliance on metadata, IBM developed the IBM Metadata Workbench, a metadata management tool that visually depicts the relationships among data sources and data users, and provides proof of data lineage required by many compliance regulations. IBM Metadata Workbench makes it easier to manage and visualize metadata for reporting and development projects that rely on this critical information embedded in data, since it is typically stored and managed in a variety of tools and technologies.
The new IBM software can also be used to pinpoint the exact impact of any data change and show the relationships among business and technical information assets. For business intelligence projects, the Metadata Workbench provides key insight into the origins of information, linking fields in leading business intelligence reporting tools all the way back to the sources from which they came, showing exactly how the data was derived. This capability is also critical for business intelligence projects that need to identify where business intelligence report elements originated.
“With Web-based visualization and navigation of metadata, IBM Metadata Workbench is the first software to provide this level of design and operational metadata visibility and management across all aspects of the data integration process, including data modeling, profiling, quality, ETL and information delivery,” said Michael Curry, director product strategy and management, IBM Information Platform and Solutions. “IBM Metadata Workbench extends the visibility of metadata across IBM Information Server product modules to external third-party tools as well, including the leading data modeling and business intelligence tools, allowing complete end-to-end metadata visualization.”
IBM’s metadata management tool also offers the ability to create new metadata objects within IBM Information Server, stitch together metadata relationships and clean up issues in the metadata directly. With the ability to outline the complete lineage of fields from applications, reports or data warehouses all the way back to source systems, including what types of processing were performed on them along the way, it can also display the exact impact of any change to any information asset, including which reports, databases, or services would be affected if a changed is made. By depicting metadata relationships like data lineage and impact analysis, it also makes it easy to find and understand metadata relationships quickly and even allows non-IT users to understand relationships.
