Companies nowadays realise that in order to achieve maximum effectiveness the ability to respond quickly to often changing market needs and accelerated product life cycles is essential. They require the ability to act quickly and intelligently across the organisation. Therefore, managers and decision-makers in all levels of a company need to share accurate information about business. In this context slogans like data warehouse (DWH) and business intelligence (BI) are very often used.

With increasing globalisation of markets and the development of new information technologies as well as communication technologies many companies are confronted with a flood of data. Therefore, they increase their capacities to record more and more data. Based on this context, managers need corresponding tools to extract the information that directly impacts business performance. In this respect, the analogy “to find a needle in a haystack“ is frequently used. Regarding to this, many companies establish a DWH or a BI solution in general, which describes decision-orientated collection and processing of data. But the data quality and the success of a BI solution depends on their metadata capabilities. A BI solution is built upon several layers and embraces different aspects across a company. In fact, all of these layers redundantly store and manage metadata depending on their specific data processing. With regard to this, an organising view of metadata in a BI solution is not available, despite its origin. Therefore, current BI environments require an associated central metadata solution.

The basic idea of the BI assignment is to deliver corporation-wide and past-referenced in- formation to the right people, at the right time which allows them to make the improved and founded business decisions. Thus, BI covers all available information instruments which support the analysis of corporation-wide facts [Cog02, page 9]. It reprents a process. In contrast, standard IT-systems for supporting operative business processes are only rudimentarily able to support operative and strategic decisions in an enterprise, because of their transaction-oriented alignment such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Accounting Systems. Therefore, it is necessary to integrate information, which is available in a corporation, into a common BI solution. In essence, a BI solution is generally built upon several elements respectively data transformations rules, description of data sources, schema information, refreshment information and business analysis requirements. All of these elements can be summarised by the term metadata.