Managing data is hard. Managing metadata is even harder. So why do I need to care about metadata? What is the value of metadata? Active metadata will help you answer this question.
Curious about what active metadata is and how it can help. Long story short – it’s a practical way to make your data more useful and easy to trust. Read on to learn more.
What is active metadata?
Traditional metadata is like a static description of your data. It tells you things like the description of the data, data types, structure or where it’s stored. This is what we can call passive metadata.
Active metadata takes things further. It adds information about how your data is used, who is using it and what happens to it. It’s updated automatically and, ideally, in real-time. This makes it much more powerful for solving problems and making decisions.
Gartner defines it as:
“Active metadata is the continuous analysis of multiple metadata streams from data management tools and platforms to create alerts, recommendations and processing instructions that are shared between highly disparate functions that change the operations of the involved tools.”
For a better understanding, let’s have a look at a classic example of metadata – data lineage. It’s very important to trace the data to the data sources and control the impact of changes. Annotated data lineage can do this with quality indicators. However, information about how data lineage has changed over time is even more important. This information allows us to comply with regulatory requirements and proactively address potential issues in the case of changes to the data lineage. Active metadata comes into the conversation when we are talking about the usage of metadata to create alerts or initiate actions.
Why does active metadata matter?
Gathering as much metadata as you can does not mean that you activated metadata. Activating metadata means continuously analyzing all of your metadata to determine trends and patterns over time. Yes, metadata can be analyzed, profiled and questioned just like regular data. Because metadata is data.
Active metadata helps organizations work smarter, not harder. Benefits include:
And the beauty of active metadata is that it evolves and builds on the previous data. Active metadata can help you to identify the actionable patterns in your data, and then those patterns and exceptions can be analyzed (again) to make an informed decision.
Additionally, when considering intelligent platforms that automate critical, time-consuming data governance and management activities, it’s very difficult to overestimate the importance of active metadata. Data profiles, log patterns, data quality trends, frequency, which records and values are used, user activities, etc. all help educate the AI models used in these platforms, making them “smarter.”
Real-life examples
Here are some ways organizations use active metadata today:
- Prevent reporting errors: Active metadata alerts teams in case of any DQ issues in the data source, ensuring reports aren’t built on incorrect numbers
- Boost productivity: Active metadata tools suggest the most relevant tables (e.g., based on popularity) and flag risks while data analysts write SQL queries
- Support compliance: Active metadata automatically flags sensitive data, helping companies meet regulations like GDPR and ensure proper handling
- Eliminate duplicative data spending: Active metadata identifies duplicate datasets or unused files, helping teams clean up and reduce storage costs
- Automate policy enforcement: Active metadata applies privacy or security policies to new columns with sensitive data or AI model inputs, ensuring compliance without manual effort
- Proactively detect issues: Active metadata monitors and detects anomalies, automatically logging data issues in the help desk system
- Enable dynamic access control: Active metadata automatically adjusts user permissions based on data sensitivity via automated classification and usage patterns, ensuring only the right people access the right data at the right time
- Improve data discovery: Active metadata enhances data relevance with recommendations based on information about popularity, relations between assets, ratings, freshness etc.
- Improve data quality: Active metadata labels data assets based on quality indicators preventing teams from using bad or outdated information in their analysis
How to get started
Using active metadata requires platforms with strong data observability, catalog, lineage, governance, privacy and quality capabilities. These capabilities should help to collect metadata from all the critical data sources, analyze it, and make it available to users in a meaningful way. Many modern platforms like Collibra use AI to automate these tasks, saving time and effort.
Why now?
Organizations are generating more data than ever. Active metadata helps them stay in control. It makes data easier to manage, safer to use and more valuable for the business.
If you want to get more from your data, active metadata is a great place to start. It’s not just about organizing your data better — it’s about using it to create real business value.
Learn more
- Read our blog to see how the Canadian telecom giant, TELUS, is using active metadata to empower the business: TELUS’s metadata maximization: Driving automation to empower and connect
- Watch this video to see additional active metadata use cases: Dynamic analytics revolution – Harnessing active metadata with Collibra
