Several years ago, I was asked by my manager what the difference between data and metadata was. She was looking for a concise statement rather than a long answer so I first popped off with the common answer “metadata is data about data”, but that is a little simple and really doesn’t answer the question.
I thought for a few minutes in terms of data and how metadata describes it, how it is used in data management / governance and came up with – “Data is created as part of doing business and metadata is created as part of doing governance on the data”.
For example, if your business is retail then as part of selling things to customers data is captured. Things like the item purchased, number of units, customers credit card number, etc. In that same business as we perform governance activities like data design, data classification, security classification, data quality checks we create metadata. Column name, data type, classification types, quality score, quality issues would be a few examples.
Since that day I have been trying to poke holes in my own definition so I thought today I would pose the question to the crowd – is the difference between data and metadata captured fully in the statement “Data is created as part of doing business and metadata is created as part of doing governance on the data”? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Oh, by the way I know I used the term business loosely, in this sense it means doing the activities of your organization for those who aren’t in business.