Page 11 - Campus Technology, January/February 2018

DATA ANALYTICS
question such as how many women graduated with STEM degrees last year can find agreed-upon definitions of terms like STEM and then navigate to the database,” explained Matt Portwood, a UW metadata analyst.
Most such repositories are designed for metadata management by data architects, noted Pieter Visser, a UW solutions architect: “They are not created for the end user at all.” In contrast, Knowledge Navigator was intended to be a tool for everybody. Visser described it as being like Google for metadata: “We try to make it as easy as possible to find how everything is related to everything else. You can start with your business terms and go all the way to the Tableau visualization or web service, and we give you the context right away.”
In their metadata repository work, both UW and Notre Dame use graph databases to represent entities and their relationships. Visser explained that within the metadata world, everything is related to everything else. “A resource in a web service or a label on a report can relate to a business term or a concept,” he said. “In a graph database you can easily connect any node to another node. Trying to do it in a relational database is almost impossible.”
Dealing with metadata can seem like an esoteric exercise that involves semantics and data science. To make it more relevant to business leaders, the UW team tied the Knowledge Navigator project to a human resources system modernization. “We are going from a mainframe system built in 1982 to a
Dealing with metadata can seem like an esoteric exercise that involves semantics and data science. To make it more relevant to business leaders, the UW team tied the Knowledge Navigator project to a human resources system modernization.
cloud-based system from Workday,” Visser said. The team decided to use Knowledge Navigator to help users understand where to find data in the new system. “We used that project as a way to leverage metadata,” he explained. “There are finance and student information system modernizations coming up too. We can reuse the tool for that.”
In the course of the upgrade, Portwood met with a project manager — someone who definitely wouldn’t describe herself a data person. “She pulled up Knowledge Navigator and went to one of our diagrams intended to help people have a sense of how Workday handles data,” he said. From this diagram, she was able to understand the context, and click to get to a business glossary where everything is defined. She shared the information in a meeting with other project managers in different functional groups. “That is what we want — to serve different types of users, whether they are business users or report consumers or data analysts,” he added. “We are working on refining the tool by better understanding our users and then meeting their specific needs.”
Agreeing on Definitions and Policies
A lot of front-end data governance work is required before a metadata tool can be of value. “While we have been building out [Knowledge Navigator], we have a metadata manager who creates a grassroots governance framework with people in areas such as student academics, finance and research,” Portwood said. For instance, a term such as “country of origin” means something specific in a student context but something else in a research context. “These are the kinds of nuances that the metadata manager is working through at a personal level,” he noted. “There is no technology fix for that.”
Portwood said there has been widespread demand for common data definitions at UW. “Our registrar’s office and the graduate schools were clamoring for it,” he said. “That was how we were able to engage with them, create this framework and get some quick wins.”
It’s a similar situation at Notre Dame, where Frederick described the lack of agreed-upon data definitions as
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2018