UMRR: Towards an enterprise-wide Web of models

Abstract

Metadata that describes the structure and semantics of data sources takes a significant role in enterprise information integration. Enterprise information integration always involves an increasing set of types of metadata that are dispersed in various repositories, modeled by various tools, represented in various formats. There is a crucial requirement to break the "Tower of Babel" among different types of metadata to enable better understanding, more comprehensive governance and analysis. Towards the goal of a simplified framework for metadata representation, federation, search and analysis, in the UMRR (Unified Metadata Registry and Repository) project at IBM, we propose and implement an open Web architecture for universal metadata management, where the Resource Description Framework (RDF) is adopted to represent the underlying metadata that are in various formats and the "Linked Data" method is leveraged to build a web of models. Our demonstration illustrates the effectiveness of this architecture to enable the metadata federation such that the global query, search and analysis on the metadata are feasible. Additionally, we also demonstrate that the proposed architecture could easily leverage Web 2.0 technologies, such as social bookmaking, tagging and RSS feeds, etc. for collaborative metadata management.