Dear Colleague,

On behalf of IRM UK Strategic IT Training and myself thank you for your interest in this, the second European Conference dedicated solely to the subject of Meta Data. The extraordinary success of our first conference, which attracted speakers and delegates from all over the world, has resulted in the conference being co-located with DAMA International’s first European Conference. You will be able to choose from sessions on Meta Data and from the DAMA conference programme. We have also adapted the programme so that the first day now offers you the opportunity to attend tutorials, which introduce the subject of Meta Data and Data Management in some depth and provide a grounding for the following 2 days.

The programme we have chosen for you provides an unparalleled source of information on the state of the art of meta data management. It features a selection of international speakers from both the USA and Europe with a proven reputation both for their ability to inform and educate, but also entertain. We have carefully chosen our speakers so that they include both a mixture of vendor and end user speakers. In the conference programme we have marked which presentations are user case studies to help you in your choice of presentations. This conference is about the practicalities of meta data management. It also provides you with an unparalleled opportunity to meet not just the speakers in your area of interest, but also other delegates with their own problems, experiences and solutions.

We all hope you will join us for what promises to be an exciting and immensely valuable experience. We look forward to seeing you in London in November.

Rosemary Rock-Evans, Independent Consultant & Ovum and Xephon Associate, RRE Associates

Meta Data Conference – Introduction

Meta data has recently enjoyed an enormous surge of renewed interest as more people come to realise it is key to the success of a vast range of important new applications – enterprise application integration (EAI), data warehousing, data mart exploitation, inter-business communication (B2B) and consumer to business communication (C2B), distributed application development and E-Commerce. Without a precise, complete description of the data you are extracting, manipulating, exchanging or creating, data cannot be exchanged between businesses or between applications, data warehouses become ineffective, legacy applications cannot be integrated, data marts cannot be built and e-commerce fails to become a reality.

About the Conference

This year we chose to organise the conference around three key themes:

• The uses for Meta Data
• Tools for Meta Data Management
• Standards for Meta Data

The Uses for Meta Data

In our last conference, we looked at many of the accepted traditional uses for meta data – Data Warehousing, Data Quality and Data Integrity assessment, evaluation of IT tools, package evaluation, ad hoc query implementation, as well as a few very specific applications, for example year 2000 implementation.This year we will be concentrating on some new exciting uses for meta data – uses which have resulted in a great wave of new interest in the subject of meta data and a greater understanding by the IT world at large of the need for meta data and meta data management.

Our speakers this year will be looking at meta data in supporting EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), B2B communication, e-commerce and C2B communication, as well as meta data in supporting artificial intelligence and parameter driven, rule based, end user processing. We have also included a paper on the use of meta data for a new type of data warehousing – involving document and image warehousing and classification.

Tools for Meta Data

The need for a repository continues to be a pre-occupation with anyone with the responsibility for meta data management. In last year’s conference we looked at the various ways in which repository technology and associated tools had been used to support meta data storage, collection, exchange, cleaning and interrogation.This year we will continue to explore this theme with papers on the challenges of implementing a repository – particularly given the rise of XML – the difficulties of keeping the many repositories used to support the various applications in step, and a paper on how population of repositories can be automated.

Standards for Meta Data

There are numerous standards which could be used for meta data description SMIT, UML, XFDL, OMG XMI and CDIF (NIST, ISO etc). Over the past year, however, the one standard which has caught the imagination of the IT community is XML, which many see as a unifying standard suited to many applications.