The Metadata Grave: When Catalogs Become Cemeteries

Introduction

Imagine walking into a large library, with fine paintings, chandeliers, antique tables, chairs, and shelves completely full of books. However, the books are unlabeled, duplicated, written in half sentences, with chapters missing. Anyone looking for a good read would find it frustrating to locate accurate and complete information. Even when they manage to find something, it is either incomplete or riddled with inaccuracies. What are the chances that the person will return to the library to read more?

This analogy perfectly mirrors the challenges faced by users when navigating a poorly managed metadata catalog. It does not matter if the catalog tooling is expensive, shows fancy dashboards, or has unlimited features — if the underlying metadata is incomplete, duplicated, or missing, it will have the same effect on a user as it did on the reader in the library.

Both may look full, but they’re dead to the reader!

How many organisations proudly show off their “thousands of assets in metadata” — yet nobody uses them? It’s far too many. Just like we do not measure the quality of a book by the number of pages it contains, we should not judge the effectiveness of a catalog by the number of assets it contains.

What is a Metadata Grave?

A metadata grave is simply a repository full of metadata that is forgotten and irrelevant.

Imagine ingesting thousands of assets into the catalog, never to be revisited again. Over time, the information would decay and cease to evolve, ultimately leading to dead data.

In every scenario, no one misses them or even remembers them. Compare this against a catalog under active ownership and stewardship, where effort is put into keeping it “alive.” This effort shows itself in the form of improved quality.

How Does It Happen?

On the surface, it happens due to the following:

· Bulk ingestion frenzy: Importing everything without curation.

· No stewardship: Allowing assets to live without owners.

· Lack of adoption: Business teams ignore the catalog.

· Documentation obsession: Every column is ingested, including staging junk.

But when you peel back the surface, you can see the root cause: the eagerness to deliver results!

The journey to govern data is expensive — requiring a CDO organization, an advanced catalog tool, and costly consultants. All the investment demands results, and the tangible result is often the data catalog.

Like Rome, a catalog is not built in a day. However, to justify the expense and demonstrate results, organisations tend to take shortcuts. You can connect to a data source and ingest everything! Can’t find the right ownership or stewardship? Just ingest everything, assign someone at random, and handle it later! The mantra becomes: “The more you ingest, the better!”

As a result, the measure of success becomes the size of the catalog: “We have a catalog of a thousand assets!” But having assets is not equivalent to having good governance.

Why Is It Dangerous?

An unmanaged and uncontrolled data catalog will eventually result in:

· Loss of trust: Users give up when they cannot find what they are looking for, or when the quality is not good enough.

· Noise kills signal: Having too much data can lead to data paralysis. People can’t find golden data and are usually overwhelmed by duplicates or too many options.

· Governance backlash: Users start to feel that this entire operation is just an overhead without any added value.

· Wasted investment: Eventually, the organisation starts to contemplate whether the catalog was an expensive mistake due to the absence of credible results.

For instance, a financial company with an unmanaged catalog might fail to locate critical data during an audit, leading to regulatory penalties.

How to Prevent the Graveyard?

A realisation that this requires time, effort, and dedication needs to be acknowledged — without the pressure to demonstrate immediate results. However, one can be smart about the journey by using some of the tips below:

· Start small: Focus only on Golden sources.

· Mandatory attributes: Define what is mandatory (e.g., definition, steward, owner) and keep it to a minimum.

· Certification labels: Assign labels for better classification (e.g., certified vs. draft vs. deprecated). This helps users distinguish information.

· Archival workflows: Always remember to retire unused assets.Usage metrics: Always prove which assets are alive and useful.

· Stewardship scorecard: Ensure accountability through practice.

Closing Reflection

A catalog should be a dynamic, living map of your organisation’s knowledge — not a repository of obsolete or forgotten data. Success should never be measured by the number of assets but by the quality of those assets. The goal should be to build a culture of data stewardship, not just ingestion pipelines to pump data into the catalog.

How does your organisation ensure its metadata catalog stays relevant and useful? Share your strategies in the comments or reach out to discuss more.