Egeria's Open Metadata and Governance Capability¶

Open metadata and governance is a set of software components that create an open, enterprise-wide metadata management and governance capability. It provides open standards and reference implementation libraries to federate and exchange metadata in standard formats.

Today, if an organization wants to have a comprehensive metadata management and governance program to support their data driven agenda, they either have to restrict their operation to a single vendor's tools, or build bridges between different tools to exchange metadata.

Open metadata and governance enables data tools, engines and platforms from different open source projects and vendors to share metadata and notifications - enabling a complete view of an organization's data assets while taking advantage of the appropriate best tools for its business.

Open metadata and governance provides a comprehensive set of standards that cover the capabilities necessary for an organization to get maximum use of its data whilst being compliant with all of the necessary regulations. These standards include APIs and event (notification) formats, frameworks for customization, a reference implementation and documentation to speed up vendor adoption since this is key to a successful ecosystem.

This ecosystem needs to operate as a peer-to-peer network of metadata repositories with minimal centralised infrastructure to allow different parts of an organization to buy the products they need and still connect into the broader metadata exchange. This allows the open metadata and governance ecosystem to grow within an organization without the need for centralised purchasing decisions and infrastructure.

Finally, open metadata and governance aims to lower the barrier of entry for open metadata and governance. This applies both to vendors and organizations that have data assets. This means that the open metadata and governance reference implementation includes metadata and governance servers that can support the metadata management and governance of a small to medium enterprises (or dept within an enterprise).

New vendor product can also be built using these servers (or the reference implementation libraries) since the vendor is able take the open metadata and governance libraries as the basis of their product and plug-in their value add to create a new offering.

The open metadata and governance technology is developed in the Egeria github repository. It is backed up by a set of guidance that describes how to create the governance capability for an organization.

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