Metadata discovery is an automated process that extracts metadata about an asset. This metadata may be:
- embedded within the asset
- (for example a digital photograph has embedded metadata), or
- managed by the platform that is hosting the asset
- (for example, a relational database platform maintains schema information about the data store in its databases) or
- determined by analysing the content of the asset
- (for example a metadata discovery tool may analyse the data content to determine the types and range of values it contains and, maybe determine a quality score for the data).
Some metadata discovery may occur when the asset is first cataloged. For example, the schema of an asset may be stored through the Data Manager OMAS API. This schema may have been automatically extracted by a metadata extractor connector hosted in Egeria's Data Platform Server which then calls the Data Manager OMAS to store the metadata.
Egeria also supports more advanced metadata discovery.
The Open Discovery Framework (ODF) has open APIs that define how automated discovery services can be managed and interact with an open metadata repository. The metadata repository interfaces provide the metadata discovery service with:
- the ability to manage discovery configuration,
- a search function to locate assets in the metadata repository,
- access all of the metadata known about each asset including its connector and
- the ability to record the results of its analysis.
This metadata repository interface for metadata discovery tools is implemented by the Discovery Engine OMAS.
Egeria is also able to host automated metadata discovery services that implement the ODF interfaces in its Asset Analysis OMES.
License: CC BY 4.0, Copyright Contributors to the ODPi Egeria project.