Wikify Your Metadata! Integrating Business Semantics, Metadata Discovery, and Knowledge Management

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Level:	Intermediate
Location:	Imperial A

We were given an imperative from our business leaders to provide a friendlier and more collaborative front end on our metadata, in order to aid in adoption of the Enterprise Data Warehouse and engage business SMEs in ownership of data definitions. The set of driving requirements -- ease of navigation, search, and ability for end users to add annotations, comments, and articles that transcend discrete data elements or subject areas -- lent themselves to a wiki. This in turn led us to MediaWiki and the rich and diverse array of add-ons developed by the Open Source community, particularly its semantic extensions.

In this session we will show:

How we programatically load and refresh information from our structured metadata store (in a relational database) into the wiki
How our Enterprise Logical Data Model and associated vocabularies provide a taxonomy under which to organize metadata for search and business context
How we exploited the semantic extensions to meta-tag content into business concepts and auto-generate pages in the wiki
How the wiki encourages refinement of data definitions and contribution of knowledge about analytical best practices
And what the future may hold given the versatility and power of open source tools to create dynamic, extensible and cost-effective metadata presentation.

John Biderman has over 20 years of experience in application development, database modeling, systems integration, and enterprise information architecture. He has consulted to Fortune 500 clients in the US, UK, and Asia. At Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (a New England-based not-for-profit health plan), he is responsible for data architecture, data integration, logical data modeling, metadata capture, architecture standards and policies, data quality interventions, project guidance, and engaging the business in data stewardship processes.

With over 30 years of software development experience and 20 years as senior technology manager and architect, Cameron McLean has helped organizations leverage evolving technology to produce market-leading software and world-class development organizations. Lately, he has worked as an independent consultant, providing hands-on leadership to refine product directions and development capabilities. Formerly, Cameron was CTO of startups Aspen Security Inc., developing RFID integration solutions, and Bremer Associates, a provider of integration tools and frameworks. He is founder and CEO/CTO of World Class Objects, taking an industry-leading role in introducing enterprise-level integration technologies, frameworks, and infrastructure. As an adviser to Verbind, Cameron was engaged by senior management to assist in the transition of the company from an ASP to installed software product, which was acquired by SAS Institute Inc. and is now marketed as the SAS Interaction Management solution. Cameron is also the former director of strategy and architecture at Groupe Bull.