3.2. Modeling Your Source Metadata

When you model the Source Metadata within your enterprise information systems, you capture some detailed information, including:

The Source Metadata captures this detailed technical metadata to provide a map of the data, the location of the data, and how you access it.

This collection of Source Metadata comprises a direct mapping of the information sources within your enterprise. If you use the JBoss Data Virtualization Server for information integration, this technical metadata plays an integral part in query resolution.

For example, our ZIPCode column and its parent table StreetAddress map directly to fields within our hypothetical address book database.

To extend our example, we might have a second source of information, a comma separated text file provided by a marketing research vendor. This text file can supply additional demographic information based upon address or ZIP code. This text file would represent another Enterprise Information System (EIS), and the meta objects in its Source Model would describe each comma separated value.