Seeking to define a new approach to data management at the enterprise level, this work takes the reader beyond information management to information control, where the methods of data capture and manipulation supersede data quantity. Using the metadata approach ensures long-term, universal control of all data characteristics and improves the effectiveness of IT as a corporate function by minimizing the potential for errors, and improving communication and understanding between IT and other disciplines. By describing how to establish metadata management within an organization, this volume provides examples of data structure architectures, and reviews issues associated with metadata management in relation to the Internet and data warehousing. It offers to help the reader to control the factors that make data useable throughout an organization and manage data so that it becomes a valuable corporate asset. The book examines real-world business departments that can benefit from this approach and ways in which sets of metadata can be both autonomous and overlapping.