Why even corporate execs need to know something about metadata

Metadata sounds like something that would be of interest strictly to people who spend most of their lives locked in a corporate data center. But as companies start building IT infrastructures around service-oriented architectures (SOA), more people—including corporate execs—need to have some idea of what metadata means.

In narrow terms, metadata is information about the data that resides in a database or an application. It reveals what system the data was created in, when it was created, when it was last changed, and by whom. In an SOA, however, metadata includes the function of individual programs themselves, and the rules for communicating with those programs.

This broader meaning of metadata is what corporate executives need to be aware of, according to Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with Waltham, Mass.-based IT market research firm ZapThink, and author of Metadata: The Lifeblood of the SOA.

Bloomberg explains that corporate execs must grasp the underlying information about their applications so as to know which applications can be linked to create new business processes. He also notes that as program elements are converted to services, those services will have metadata that needs to be understood for the services to be reusable—an essential element of a true service-oriented architecture.