Gartner - 2020 Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions

Metadata management is a core aspect of an organization’s ability to manage its data and information assets. The term “metadata” describes the various facets of an information asset that can improve its usability throughout its life cycle.

Metadata and its uses go far beyond technical matters. Metadata is used as a reference for business-oriented and technical projects, and lays the foundations for describing, inventorying and understanding data for multiple use cases. Use-case examples include data governance, security and risk, data analysis and data value.

The market for metadata management solutions is complex because these solutions are not all identical in scope or capability. Vendors include companies with one or more of the following functional capabilities in their stand-alone metadata management products (not all vendors offer all these capabilities, and not all vendor solutions offer these capabilities in one product):

• Metadata repositories — Used to document and manage metadata, and to perform analysis using metadata. Organizations can also use repositories to publish information about reusable assets, which enables users to browse metadata during life cycle activities such as design, testing and release management.
• Business glossary — A repository used to communicate and govern an enterprise’s business terms, along with the associated definitions and the relationships between those terms.
• Data lineage — Specifies data’s origins and where it moves over time. Data lineage also describes what happens to data as it goes through diverse systems and processes. Data lineage can help with analyzing how information is used and tracking the flow of information across the enterprise, serving various purposes.
• Impact analysis — Conveys extensive details about the dependencies of information or the impact of a change propagated from a data source.
• Rule management — Automates the enforcement of business rules that are tied to data elements and associated metadata. This capability supports dedicated interfaces for the creation of, and the order of execution and links with, information stewardship for effective governance.
• Semantic frameworks — Include support for taxonomies; entity relationship (ER) models; and ontology and modeling languages such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

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