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Metadata management in the enterprise

Data without context has limited value. Metadata provides this context, and as a result, plays an essential role in the enterprise. There are two types of metadata - structural and descriptive. Structural metadata refers to the specific components and design of data structures whereas descriptive metadata, the type we will be referring to, handles the actual data content, including the information related to discovery and identification. Metadata offers organizations insight into why and how the data was created, time and date of creation, and author and location, as well as standards that might have been used to create it.


Metadata management gives businesses insight into their data, allowing them to provide better user experience for the future. With a metadata management solution, businesses can consolidate data, making it easier to access for future use and ultimately promotes reuse. In addition to providing a way to consolidate metadata, a metadata management solution enables businesses to obtain metadata from applications and utilize it in a way to help future application design. MuleSoft offers solutions to help businesses take advantage of metadata throughout the enterprise.

  • CloudHub Insight - Working with MuleSoft’s cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS), CloudHub Insight is a tool that provides organizations visibility into business events and transactions, allowing them track everything data does in an application. Insight delivers searchable information to help businesses answer key questions about their applications, such as: What happened with a particular transaction? When did it occur? How long did it take? What was the result? If something went wrong, what was it and at what point did it fail? Moreover, CloudHub insight enables businesses to drill down on data, analyze information, and test for compliance.
  • DataSense - Acquire information about data and prescribe methods on how to accurately map or use data in an application. DataSense replaces the task of having to manually discover information that is employed by internal and external repositories and resources. Anypoint Platform's Mule Runtime discovers the information and intelligently uses it to make suggestions regarding application design. For example, if an application connects to Salesforce (or any other SaaS application), DataSense works to capture details about the type and structure of data employed by Salesforce, then manipulates the information to advise what type of data your business should send or expect to receive from Salesforce. DataSense identifies and utilizes metadata to help businesses get the most out of application integration.

In addition to the above metadata management solutions, MuleSoft also offers DataWeave as a component within Anypoint Studio to help businesses with their data integration needs and handle data mapping and design flows. With DataWeave, users can easily change fields and re-create mappings as needed. Moreover, DataWeave makes it easy to extract metadata from SaaS applications, configure input and output, and map it between Anypoint connectors with only a few clicks.

MuleSoft makes it easy to manage metadata across the enterprise. Moreover, with metadata management, master data management can be executed more efficiently as metadata encompasses the definitions, rules, metrics, and policies that are required in master data management. With Anypoint Platform businesses can integrate applications, services, and software to create connectivity across the enterprise ecosystem - on-premise and in the cloud. Anypoint Platform's Mule Runtime simplifies design, development, deployment, and management of applications, and works with CloudHub, CloudHub Insight, DataSense, and DataWeave to make metadata much more usable.

Learn more about the entire Anypoint Platform and what it has to offer businesses of all size for their integration and metadata management needs or contact us today to get started.