Reviewing basic concepts of data governance

We already should know enough, technically, to handle all of the QlikView elements in this chapter. Therefore, the only element that I want to review is the whole concept of metadata.

Understanding what metadata is

So, what exactly is metadata and how does it apply to QlikView?

The prefix meta means several things, depending on how it is used. In the area of Epistemology, the study of knowledge, meta simply means about. So, metadata is information about data: where the data has come from, who owns the data, who produced the data, when the data was produced, what format the data is in, and so forth.

One piece of data can have quite a lot of metadata. Traditionally, metadata has been broken down into two types: structural and descriptive. A third type, administrative, is critical for correct data governance.

Each of these types can be broken down into many more subtypes, but we really need to be careful about how far we go with the process. We want...