Metadata Management for Data Warehouse Projects

Metadata management has been identified as one of the major critical success factor in data warehousing projects, but the industrialization process of metadata management did not yet reach a satisfying level of maturity from both a methodological and a technological point of view; therefore every project has to build its own metadata management system following the methodology that better fits its requirements. This paper describes the metadata management methodology designed during a e-government data warehouse project and shows how it could be applied by means of a real case study. The methodology we have devised and effectively put into action covers the entire process of building and running a metadata management system in a data warehouse project; its main objective is to exploit metadata to create an homogeneous, structured and integrated “vision” of the data warehouse system in order to produce valuable metadata-based services for the end users.