“Properly managing enterprise metadata is of vital importance to any successful Global 2000 company or government agency. The Unicorn System™ is a relatively new and exciting player in the metadata management arena. It is distinguished in its ability to capture the formal business semantics of data and in applying this metadata to assist in automating the tasks of data integration and quality.”

--- David Marco, Founder and President of Enterprise Warehousing Solutions, Inc., author of Building & Managing the Meta Data Repository and the world's foremost authority on meta data

To request a Unicorn System Solutions Sheet entitled, "SIM & Metadata Repositories, visit our Literature page.

Many IT organizations support their business utilizing a complex infrastructure involving multiple data technologies and data formats, different applications, and pieces of infrastructure include EAI and ETL. Just as you cannot build and maintain a shopping mall without plans, so the IT environment will never be efficiency and cannot produce quality information without metadata – data about the IT environment and the business processes it relates to.

Most modern enterprises are burdened by business information being stored and transmitted in many databases and message formats each of which is set up with different structures (or “schemas”). These data sources will be held together with many manually coded point-to-point transformations running independently or within EAI and ETL infrastructure. While metadata can document this environment, even with metadata, these hard-coded transformations will be unlikely to provide business information which is consistent and accurate; certainly they create an environment which is rigid and in which each business change required extensive manual intervention to update code.

The solution to this is Semantic Information Management – formally capturing the business meaning (semantics) of each data asset once only by mapping to an Information Model which captures the desired strategic view of the business. In this way, while there are many different data structures in use, each has a formal well-defined business meaning by reference to the same agreed-upon vocabulary of the Information Model.

With the help of data semantics, the management of the data environment can be streamlined to produce higher quality information from a more agile and more efficient infrastructure. Queries and data translation scripts can be automatically inferred from the semantics. The impact of any change may be analyzed instantaneously. And data standards and policy, including security and privacy policy, may be applied in a consistent way based on business requirements.

In summary, metadata documents the environment, data semantics is the next critical stage which achieves the strategic aim of capturing the business meaning of the data and utilizes it to create higher quality business information from a more agile, more efficient and more automated environment. In many ways, data semantics is the killer application for metadata.

The Metadata Repository
The metadata repository is the fundamental infrastructure for any metadata effort. Specialized metadata repositories which are optimized for particular types of metadata and often integrated into product suites (e.g. a metadata repository which is specialized for ETL data may be integrated into an ETL product) can be bought or constructed. Metadata repositories provide only a general framework for storing many different types of metadata as well as scanners for uploading metadata from various sources. They also provide facilities such as versioning and impact analysis and the ability to link between different artifacts of metadata. General-purpose metadata repositories generally do not provide specific support for data semantics and do not provide applications over the metadata.

The Unicorn System and the Metadata Repository
Unicorn provides a comprehensive system for Semantic Information Management (SIM) – i.e. managing the structured data in an enterprise based on understanding of the data’s business meaning. The System includes:

• Specialized Metadata Repository – for documenting data assets and their schemas and metadata
• Information Model – creating a strategic model and vocabulary of the enterprise
• Data Semantics – capturing data's business meaning by mapping schemas to the Information Model
• Active Capabilities – these utilize the data semantics to support & automate day-to-day work with the data environment including data management, data integration and information quality

Unicorn does not provide a general-purpose metadata repository, but rather a repository that specializes in data assets in support of Semantic Information Management. Therefore, the Unicorn System can be used independently or over a general purpose metadata repository – depending on whether the metadata needs extend beyond data assets.