IBM has announced <A HREF="http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/integration/metadata_workbench/">IBM Metadata Workbench,</A> new data visualization and management software within IBM Information Server designed to deliver important insight about data and speed deployment of SOA, SOA, compliance, business intelligence and master data integration projects.

Metadata is information embedded within data that describes its important attributes such as where it originated, what it means, where it has been, and how it can be used. It is becoming an increasingly important element of compliance initiatives, information integration efforts and electronic discovery for the Web.

To help IT and business users better manage their growing reliance on metadata, IBM developed the IBM Metadata Workbench, a metadata management tool that visually depicts the relationships among data sources and data users, and provides proof of data lineage required by many compliance regulations. The IBM Metadata Workbench makes it easier to manage and visualize metadata for reporting and development projects that rely on this critical information embedded in data, since it is typically stored and managed in a variety of tools and technologies.

The new IBM software can also be used to pinpoint the exact impact of any data change and show the relationships among business and technical information assets. For SOA business intelligence projects, the Metadata Workbench provides key insight into the origins of information, linking fields in leading business intelligence reporting tools linking SOA service data elements all the way back to the sources from which they came, showing exactly how the data was derived. This capability is also critical for business intelligence projects that need to identify where business intelligence report elements originated.