To make better use of data
Working with data can enable startling insights or cause confusion within an organization depending on its accuracy, availability or quality. Being able to harness the power of data empowers organizations to operate from a knowledgeable standpoint, putting them ahead of the game. However, when data is not accurate or governed it becomes an inhibitor to success.
Today’s organization have many repositories, applications, and tools that create islands of data and capability. Data as it moves between these islands is frequently manipulated, causing each data island to have a slightly different view. Such inconsistencies can cause low use of data due to concerns over data accuracy and heritage.
Without accurate, honed, complete and governed data, an organisation is working blind or worse from a basis of untruth!
Introducing ODPi Egeria…
Egeria is an ODPi project (ODPi is part of The Linux Foundation) that is enabling an open standard for metadata management across all technologies that touch
data. This benefits organizations by enabling them to manage their data’s heritage, lineage, provenance, semantics, relationships, evolution, change and so on.
Many technologies in the data landscape have their own proprietary metadata store containing it’s own island of metadata. Egeria enables these different tools to exchange metadata, supplementing their metadata content and increasing its consistency. This is done using Egeria’s distributed real-time metadata highway. The highway connects selected metadata repositories, tools and applications together providing a bi-directional unified view of the metadata across the data landscape.
In the situation where a tool’s metadata repository is advanced, Egeria utilizes those capabilities directly. Conversely when the Metadata repository is less capable, Egeria can fill in the gaps. This enables comprehensive management and visibility for all metadata in the data landscape.
Egeria’s “Savvy Skills”
Egeria is an active Open Source project which continues to evolve new capabilities at pace. Here are my favorite “Savvy Skills” in Egeria, most of which are available today:
- Ultimate Source and Destination for data assets, or Full Lineage
- Provenance of Metadata
- Time Travel Through our Data Landscape
- Data Awareness, Notifications, Metadata Discovery
- Governance, Access and Security
- Understanding for All, through Business Glossaries
- Collaboration
I will be detailing all these in my next blog – “My favorite Seven ‘Savvy Skills’ of Egeria”.
Why Open Source?
Egeria seeks to create an open implementation for organizations, data tool vendors and open source projects to utilize for their metadata management and governance. This implementation will enable data repositories, tools and applications to keep their metadata synchronized – which in turn promotes consistency and visibility of valuable data across the whole data landscape within an organization. An open source implementation provides access for all and most importantly breaks down the barriers created by competitive pressures between vendors.
For an organization to take on the challenge of integrating all the silos of metadata itself, is a colossal project. In a community of organisations and individuals collaborating together, each can choose which area/s is of most importance for them to work on. With focus, such a community is able to contribute a wide set of capabilities back to the project, which benefits all. If you or your organisation would like to become ODPi Egeria contributor please visit the ODPi Egeria website for more information. Of course you can always use ODPi Egeria, contributing to the project is completely optional.
Egeria is cutting new ground and to be able to continue to do this since the wider community provides a continuous stream of new ideas and skills. Only an open source project enables such a diverse collection of people to work together to create such a comprehensive metadata solution.
Who is Egeria?
“Egeria (Latin:Ēgeria) was a nymph attributed a legendary role in the early history of Rome as a divine consort and counsellor of Numa Pompilius” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egeria_(mythology)
The Latin goddess Egeria is considered as a water nymph who created laws that pertain to rituals and religious practices. With ODPi Egeria we see her as managing and governing the metadata of an organization’s data lakes and beyond. Egeria has the ability to govern all data assets as they ebb and flow around the islands of data stores and applications in an organization.
Watch out for my future blogs as I delve deeper into ODPi Egeria.