Introduction 

Metadata management is a combination of two words such as metadata and management. So, in order to understand the concept of metadata in an effective manner, it is important to understand both the terms metadata and management. Metadata in a simple term can be defined as the data which provides information about different aspects of the data. It helps in summarizing the basic information of the data (Rodriguez et al., 2015). The second term management can be defined as the administration of an organization, people, or things. Thus, metadata management can be defined as the administration of data that describes other data. It includes the process of establishing policies and procedures to ensure that information is integrated, accessed, linked, analyzed, maintained, and shared to best effect the organization. The purpose of metadata management is to ensure that it is easy for a person to locate a particular data asset.

Benefits of metadata management

Metadata management helps in avoiding the problem of data retrieval. It also helps in maintaining information throughout the organization that is not dependent on the knowledge of a particular employee. Metadata management significantly improves efficiency and hence faster delivery of the project and product can be achieved (Thomson and Abadi, 2015). It ensures less redundancy of effort along with greater consistency across multiple instances of data.

The need for metadata management

Metadata management is very significant for the organization for various purposes. If an organization does not manage metadata during the lifecycle of the system, it will create silos of inconsistence metadata in the organization that does not meet the full needs of any team. It also provides conflicting information. Thus, in order to avoid this metadata management should be done effectively. Metadata management increases the trust of the user in the data. Ineffective management of metadata increases the cost of the organization and hence the organization's efficiency reduces. Several tools and techniques are presented to the users which further increases the cost. It creates redundancy and does not provide the full value of the investment (Thomson and Abadi, 2015). Thus, there is a need to manage metadata significantly within the organization. It provides a clear picture or benefits to the technical and business users along with the organization.

Data lineage and versioning 

Metadata management requires effective data governance. Data lineage is the first and significant step for data governance. Data lineage can be defined as a type of data lifecycle which includes the origin of data and its transformation with time or where it moves over time. It also describes that when data goes through different or diverse processes what happens to it. It helps in analyzing how information is used (Li et al., 2016). With the help of data lineage, key bits of information can be tracked which serves a specific purpose. Data lineage plays a significant role in the operation of a business. The following are the reasons for it.

Data lineage significantly affects the existence of the business. Data is essential for the survival ability of the organization. It words as fuel for the different departments and functions of the business. For example, if there is no data the marketing department of the organization cannot function effectively as it requires data regarding customer behavior and demographics of the customer. Specific sources of data have a prominent impact and implication within the organization (Li et al., 2016). Data lineage is also important because data keeps on changing over time and data lineage helps in tracking the changes in the data.

Data versioning is referred to as saving new copies of the file when changes are made in the data. It helps in retrieving a particular version of files later whenever required. While creating a new version of files, it is important to record the change made in the file and give a unique name to the new file. For example, include a version name such as v1, v2, v3...vn. With the help of data versioning, changes in the data can be easily tracked. So, the organization can easily analyze the trends in data to improve the function of the organization. Data versioning is very important for the research and development department of the organization (Haller et al., 2016). The researcher can effectively identify the exact dataset to conduct the research. It improves the performance and productivity of the department and the whole organization. Thus, it is also a key step in the process of metadata management.

Conclusion 

Metadata management is very important for the organization to collect, store, and analyze a wide set of data. Metadata management improves the performance of the organization. It also improves efficiency and effectiveness along with the productivity of the organization.

References 

Haller, I., Van Der Kouwe, E., Giuffrida, C., & Bos, H. (2016, April). METAlloc: Efficient and comprehensive metadata management for software security hardening. In Proceedings of the 9th European Workshop on System Security (p. 5). ACM.

Li, S., Besson, S., Blackburn, C., Carroll, M., Ferguson, R. K., Flynn, H., ... & Moore, W. J. (2016). Metadata management for high content screening in OMERO. Methods, 96, 27-32.

Rodriguez, T. F., Calhoon, S., & Reed, A. M. (2015). U.S. Patent No. 8,953,908. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Thomson, A., & Abadi, D. J. (2015). CalvinFS: Consistent {WAN} Replication and Scalable Metadata Management for Distributed File Systems. In 13th {USENIX} Conference on File and Storage Technologies ({FAST} 15) (pp. 1-14).