Metadata Workbench Released; Provides Insight into SOA

IBM has announced its Metadata Workbench, a data visualization and management software designed to provide insight about data and speed deployment of SOA, compliance, business intelligence, and master data integration projects.

More specifically, Metadata Workbench is 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. The 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, Metadata Workbench provides 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 important for business intelligence projects that need to identify where business intelligence report elements originated.

The tool also lets you 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.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:50 PM  Permalink