Metadata Standard

["Baker, Graham" <GrahamBaker@auslig.gov.au>]

The following item, which appeared in "The Australian" of Tue 18 Mar 97,
was drawn to my attention by Bill Collins of the ACT Government.

VENDORS UNITE FOR METADATA STANDARD
by ADRIANNE BEE, San Jose

INFORMATICA is leading an attempt to establish a metadata standard that
would make it easier to obtain "data about data-.

The Metadata Exchange (MX) Architecture initiative is backed by an
alliance of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) software suppliers
including Business Objects, MicroStrategy, Brio and Cognos.

"This is one of those times in the industry when it seems more
productive for major vendors to get together and map out some kind of
definition for interoperability," International Data Corp's research
director, Mr Henry Morris, says.

"An industry consortium would take more time to come out with a standard
and this really takes a load off the backs of IS in the meantime."

Metadata, holds the name, type, range of values, source and
authorisation for accessing each data element in an organisation's files
and databases.

Administrators can use metadata repositories to ascertain where a data
record has come from; where it was moved to; what changes, if any,
happened to it; and who its owner is.

Analysts say the alliance is "a good first step" towards consistency
between the different data warehouses and the tools that access them.

MX provides a set of application program interfaces (APIs) that OLAP,
query and access tool vendors can use to integrate their products with
Informatica's metadata repository.

The initiative allows enterprise metadata to be delivered to the
desktop.

Users can access the technical and business metadata, underlying their
data warehouse environments.

This should reduce the need to contact information services over
problems of data accuracy and data integrity.

Three of the companies involved in the effort - Brio, Business Objects
and MicroStrategy - have already implemented MX in their product lines.

The remaining companies - Andyne, Information Advantage, Infospace and
IQ Software - are expected to integrate MX by the end of this year.

Informatica says its MX Architecture enables IS professionals to improve
warehouse maintenance and management capability, and reduces the time
and resources required to support end-user requests.

With MX, a data-transformation formula is changed at the source.  It
then becomes automatically viewable in OLAP tools and local metadata
repositories.

Analysts say MX will allow business decisions to be made with increased
confidence.

Informatica's metadata repository is a component of its Power Suite
data-marting product, released last year.

The offering manages data extraction across major databases including
Oracle, Sybase and Informix, as well as Unix flavours and NT.

Working in tandem with Informatica's repository, a front-end tool could,
for example, track a savings account and let an end user know of any
changes made.

The necessary interfacing varies from vendor to vendor.

Business Objects maintains its own metadata repository.

"We pull across the Informatica repository information on to the client
dynamically," Mr Jeff Coombs, the company's director of worldwide
partner alliances, says.

"This greatly eases the task of building documents in our environment,
because we don't have to rebuild the data.

"Metadata  Exchange gives us a standard for reading the data.

"It will help IS get data marts up and running more quickly."


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