Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge

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business. It should be noted, however, that usually more metadata is hiding

behind the scenes than is revealed by the headings alone, such as the formulas

used to calculate the values in the column. Formulas are a very important type

of business metadata, and formula definitions need to be tracked and available

for businesspeople to access any time the aggregate appears. Often the report

does not contain the explanation of the formulas, unless you have access to the

program that generates the report. Then you must extract the formulas from

this program.

One of the problems of using reports as a source for metadata is that typically

a report ...