Metadata Exchange

The Metadata Exchange is an open-source platform consisting of a central “data catalogue” and a number of plugins that allow users to classify and describe the data that exists within their organization.

The Metadata Exchange makes data:

• Better understood:
  • Drugs across the world are administered based on a patient's weight. However, the provenance of this information is often lost: is it patient reported? Measured on scales? In kg or lb? Measured recently? Our toolkit allows you to capture this information and share it with users.
• Better quality:
  • 17,000 Men are Pregnant in the UK: due to incorrectly entered medical codes at British hospitals, thousands of men apparently required obstetric and prenatal exams - this has a financial and planning implication and should be simple to rectify by metadata driven quality checks
• More interoperable:
  • After a decade of development costing $7 billion the Ariane 5 first launch exploded. The destroyed rocket and its cargo were valued at $500 million. A board of inquiry investigated the causes of the explosion and in two weeks issued a report. It turned out that the cause of the failure was a software error in the inertial reference system. Specifically a 64 bit floating point number relating to the horizontal velocity of the rocket with respect to the platform was converted to a 16 bit signed integer. The number was larger than 32,767, the largest integer store-able in a 16 bit signed integer, and thus the conversion failed.
• Cheaper to access, use and manage:
  • 79% of data analysts' time is spent on data logistics. Creating a central catalogue of data within your organisation can cut the time spend on data logistics by over 50%.