Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge

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2.3 Definition of Metadata Revisited

Figure 2.1 shows the number 7. What does this number tell you? By itself it

doesn’t say very much. It could mean almost anything. It could mean the age

of your child. It could refer to the number of days in the week. It could tell you

how many runs your baseball team scored last night. In a word, the number 7

standing by itself really doesn’t say anything at all; it’s meaningless. In order to

be meaningful the raw number 7 needs context.

Suppose we added some metadata so that we now have a value of

$7-NYSE.

Now we can see that the number 7 refers to dollars and that furthermore

those dollars relate in some ...