It's important to manage your metadata well so that people can easily find, understand, use and share your information assets.

Improving how your agency manages metadata will also help it achieve Action 10 and Action 11 of the Building trust in the public record policy.

You can improve the way you manage your metadata by conducting a project to develop a metadata management framework or strategy.

A metadata framework is a planned, iterative approach to improving how your agency manages its metadata. A metadata strategy identifies goals and provides a path for improvement. Alternatively, you can incorporate metadata into your existing planning documents, such as your information governance framework and information management strategy.

Developing a metadata framework

Follow these steps to:

• target areas where metadata quality could be improved
• improve metadata management across your agency.

1. Determine the scope

Decide whether your project will be enterprise-wide or limited in scope.

There are benefits from improving metadata management at the broadest practical level. However, if the scope of your project is too ambitious, it may be unsustainable or harder to implement.

You may start with a broad, enterprise-wide view, but plan for incremental improvements in areas of greatest need.

In deciding the scope of your project, ask:

• how many users would this change benefit?
• what resources are available?
• how much improvement can it actually deliver?
• is it practical?
• is it sustainable?
• what are the priorities for action?

You could include in your project scope:

• the whole enterprise or agency
• a new system or systems being acquired or developed
• all business areas or user communities with a related line of business
• areas of greatest business risk or value
• areas where metadata implementation requires most improvement.

Your project scope may target specific information assets on your agency's information asset register.

2. Confirm support and resources

Obtain senior management endorsement for your project.

This will ensure you can engage stakeholders to establish contact points and support roles.

3. Consult key stakeholders

Consult key stakeholders to better understand:

• the current state of metadata implementation
• any existing issues related to metadata
• possible improvements
• user needs.

Key stakeholders could include:

• staff who use information systems
• business owners of information systems
• information system administrators
• information technology support staff
• data or metadata analysts
• data stewards or custodians
• senior information or data management staff, for example a chief data officer or chief information governance officer.

Some of these stakeholders can also help you undertake the project.

4. Understand existing practices

Work closely with your stakeholders to understand what practices and schemas are already in place and could be built upon.

You should look at informal and ad hoc practices and schemas as well as formal or official ones.

Look at:

• existing system configurations
• schemas in use or proposed for use
• data models
• common business language
• controlled vocabularies.

When engaging with stakeholders, you may discover issues that are beyond the scope of the project. You will need to decide whether to address these issues in the current project or note them for future action.

5. Identify best-practice schemas or standards

Identify

Identify any available schemas or standards recognised as best practice, especially those which set baseline requirements relevant to your business (for example, geospatial, medical or scientific).

Regardless of any specialised schemas or standards relevant to your agency’s business, your agency must consider standards for managing its business information. The National Archives offers the minimum metadata set to meet minimum requirements for information management metadata, and the Australian Government Recordkeeping Metadata Standard (AGRkMS) to guide more comprehensive implementation. 

Compare

Compare these standards with your existing metadata implementation. Identify whether your existing implementation conforms to these schemas and standards or needs improvement.

Adapt

You may need to adapt schemas and standards to meet the unique requirements of your business or work within system configuration constraints.

Remember that adapting or deviating from recognised standards can be risky. Assess whether the risk is acceptable.

Document

Make a record of:

• which schemas and standards you have decided to adopt
• how they meet the business need
• any adaptations made.

6. Prepare your framework

Write a framework for metadata implementation based on the user needs, schemas and standards you have identified.

At a minimum, your framework should outline:

• the schemas and standards to be used
• roles and responsibilities for using and managing metadata
• systems, processes, procedures and rules to help maintain the metadata implementation
• evaluation and monitoring processes
• review cycles
• approval processes.

Seek endorsement from senior management for the framework.

Once endorsed, promote the framework to users within all relevant business areas.

7. Configure

Configure metadata in agency information systems, according to the requirements of the schema wherever possible.

Workarounds, such as cross-mapping across systems, may need to be incorporated to support the schema.

8. Communicate

Help users understand their responsibilities in maintaining metadata as outlined in the framework, with reference to roles, procedures and business rules.

9. Respond to change

It’s important to ensure your metadata continues to meet the changing needs of your users over time.

Revisit your metadata implementation regularly to ensure it:

• effectively enables people to find, understand, use and share information
• complies with current standards
• meets the changing needs of your business environment and users
• works with your business information systems
• is automated wherever possible.

Make sure you check in with your users often to ensure they:

• contribute to, adopt and understand agreed metadata terms and definitions
• are creating good quality metadata using tools available within your agency.

Metadata management tools

There are a number of tools your agency can consider to manage metadata, and continually improve its quality and usage.

If you decide to use one or more metadata management tools, you should document this in the next iteration of your metadata framework.

Business glossary

A business glossary lists easy to understand definitions of approved terms used by your agency to describe data. Its purpose is to eliminate ambiguity and misunderstandings across business areas.

Developing a business glossary can inform your local metadata schema and help you to describe and categorise metadata elements in a data dictionary or metadata registry.

Data dictionary

A data dictionary lists data elements, including associated metadata, within data assets to help users understand how each element is used and how they can be understood. Typically, they provide details such as name, definition, data type, size and permissible values for each data element.

Data dictionaries are often very specific to individual data assets, documenting their existing structure. However, they can sometimes also be used as a conceptual representation to guide configuration, support publication or adopt schemas identified in your metadata framework.

Using data dictionaries can ensure common understanding of data assets for users, developers and other stakeholders and allow data to be re-used more easily.

Metadata registry

A metadata registry is an interactive application which can be used to register and govern all aspects of metadata including business terms, data elements, classification schemes, indicators and the relationships between them.

You may wish to look at standards to better understand the purpose of a metadata registry and how to coordinate the registration process. Useful standards include:

• AS ISO/IEC 11179 Information Technology – Metadata Registries
• ISO/IEC TR 20943 Information Technology – Procedures for Achieving Metadata Registry Consistency.

Making a metadata registry or data dictionary compliant with these standards will ensure your data is described in a consistent way that can be understood outside your agency. An example of an ISO 11179 compliant metadata registry is METeOR, Australia’s repository for national metadata standards for health, housing and community services statistics and information.

Identify other improvements

Our Data interoperability maturity model, in particular the ‘Semantic’ theme, can help your agency assess its maturity in managing metadata and identify further steps to improve its maturity.

Building metadata capability

Investing in your capability to manage metadata can help meet the needs of your organisation over time. Some suggested resources include:

• Capabilities for information management professionals – see ‘Metadata’
• Data Management Body of Knowledge (DMBoK) – see chapter 12 ‘Metadata Management’