Managing metadata in Data Fabric

Metadata is essential for discoverability, governance, and interoperability in data-driven organizations. Effective metadata management ensures that data assets are understandable, traceable, and accessible across systems and teams. In the Data Fabric architecture, metadata enables automation, links distributed data sources, and supports intelligent data operations. Without an efficient metadata strategy, organizations risk data silos, degraded data quality, and inefficient decision-making.

This chapter outlines procedures for viewing, managing, and creating metadata in Data Fabric.

Data Catalog

The Data Catalog is a centralized application for storing and managing metadata that is related to an organization's data objects. The Data Catalog acts as a registry for discovering, understanding, and governing data assets. The Data Catalog helps store metadata by capturing technical, business, and operational details, and supports the searching and browsing for metadata.

For details on how to store, manage, and view metadata in the Data Catalog, see the "Data Catalog" section of this documentation.

Creating custom metadata

Custom metadata defines organization-specific objects and can be imported or generated with the schema wizard or metadata crawler. This streamlines the registration and management of custom data structures in Data Catalog.

For details on how to create metadata for custom objects in the Data Catalog, see the "Creating custom metadata" section of this documentation.

Data Catalog APIs

The Data Catalog APIs enable access to metadata operations. The APIs support retrieving, creating, and updating metadata records and are essential for integrating external systems with the Data Catalog.

Metagraphs

Metagraphs is a free-form modeling canvas and tool for defining domain-specific resource models and describing relationships between Data Lake objects. Metagraphs supports modeling by drag and drop and simplifies the generation and publication of Compass views for Data Lake.

For details on how to describe Data Lake data object relationships, see the "Metagraphs" section of this documentation.