Metadata Interchange - Good, Bad or Ugly?

[ngalemmo]

As long as I can remember, the industry has been trying to come up with a metadata interchange standard.  Actually, there have been many standards, just not one that everyone could agree on.
Why have a standard?  The thinking goes that there would be a single global metadata repository to service modeling tools, query tools, databases, etc...  It would contain business terms, descriptions, technical definitions, formulas and so on.  You define/maintain everything once and all the tools would understand it and act accordingly.
Is this good or bad or even doable?
Can a standard be developed that would allow for proprietary features so that competitive differentiators can co-exist with interoperability?
Would product interoperability and reduction of the metadata maintenance effort increase or decrease the number of BI/Reporting tools used in a IT shop?
What do you think?

[legSPINNER]

I think a common standard makes sense. More effective integration and re-use would certainly make life easier.

The industry has certainly been holding its breath on this one.  Vendor lock-in, as usual, seems to me to still be the hurdle.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the two camps are:
- Open Information Model (OIM) = Microsoft
- Common Warehouse Model (CWM) = IBM, Oracle?

[freesample]

Perhaps as the players in the DWH market consolidate/rationalise it would be another driver to convergence toward a common standard.

Stoopid questions:
- even if players agree on common MI standard what would need to be in place to support?
- what is UML's connection to all this? I read an article once and it mentioned UML's role as an important one but it lost me....

[ngalemmo]

legSPINNER is correct, the two major standards competing today are OIM and CWM.  There have been others in the past, and I am sure there are or will be others in the future.

I'm not sure where UML fits in other than it may adopt one of these standards or come up with one of its own.  UML really doesn't address data modeling all that much and would require extensions to support the kinds of metadata necessary.  My guess is if the UML committee does something, it will most likely be another standard to compete with OIM, CWM and anyone else.

I agree that 'vendor lock' may be a underlying disincentive to and accepted common standard.  However, I would argue that such a standard would open the market to all vendors, allowing them to enter sites previously inaccessible because of commitment to a competing product.  The biggest barrier to a vendor selling into a competitor's site is the cost to configure and maintain disparate metadata repositories.  With that barrier removed, more IT shops would be willing to bring in alternate BI tools to fit specific business needs.