Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge

xix

Preface

Purpose of this Book

Data without context is worthless. We as IT professionals have seen countless

times where people misunderstood the data—and the consequences were not

pretty. On the flip side, when presented with context behind the data (the back-

ground, history, assumptions, business rules, definitions of terms, etc.) things

became clearer, people understood each other better, and decisions were easier,

with better results. We have a name for this business context behind data: it’s

called Business Metadata.

There are a bunch of books on the market which talk about metadata in

general; one of which was written by Adrienne Tannenbaum, our reviewer. It

is not our intention to replicate what has already been said in these books. The ...