Typical repositories store dozens to hundreds of separate pieces of information about each data structure.
Metadata of a security nature may show the restrictions which limit who may view these names.
Second, physical: For data stored in a brick and mortar library, one have many volumes and may have various media, including books.
This contextual information of business data include meaning and content, policies that govern, technical attributes, specifications that transform, and programs that manipulate.
Data dictionaries are the universe of metadata repository in the initial stages but as the scope increased Business glossary and their tags to variety of status flags emerged in the business side while consumption of the technology metadata, their lineage and linkages made the repository, the source for valuable reports to bring business and technology together and helped data management decisions easier as well as assess the cost of the changes.
By providing the relationships to all the metadata points across the organization and maintaining its integrity with an architecture to handle the changes, metadata repository provides the basic material for understanding the complete data flow and their definitions and their impact.
Also the important feature is to maintain the version control though this statement for contrasting is open for discussion.
Metadata repository enables all the structure of the organizations data containers to one integrated place.
Usually business spends much time and money to make decisions based on discovery and research on impacts to make changes or to add new data structures or remove structures in data management of the organization.
With a structured and well maintained repository, moving the product from ideation to delivery takes the least amount of time (considering other variables are constant).
Database applications already have their own repositories or registries that are expected to provide all of the necessary functionality to access the data stored within.
An XML gateway is created[1]: 246 that acts as a directory for accessing the metadata within each different application.
Design of information model should include various layers of metadata types to be overlapped to create an integrated view of the data.