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July 18, 2006

Patterns of Metadata

When experts or professionals deal with problems they tend to approach the problem based on their past experience. They usually recall similar experiences and draw the best practices and lessons learned and then apply them over and over again. For most of us in information technology, the concepts of reuse are not new but few of us pay homage to Christopher Alexander and his original work on utilizing patterns in architecture. The object oriented crowd picked up on patterns and changed an industry. A recent book The Design of Sites (Van Duyne, Landay, Hong, 2002) describes a collection of patterns for building web sites. The book begins with a short chapter on the foundations of good design, which provides principles, standards, and focuses on customer-centric goals. The core of the book is the 12 design categories based on real examples which are described in detail. Clearly, the metadata repository vendors should all read this book and apply as many of the patterns as possible. However, is it possible to create patterns for enterprise metadata?

Posted by Todd at July 18, 2006 6:43 PM