IBM recently announced a unified metadata services infrastructure that's designed to ease metadata management, access, and sharing within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The IBM WebSphere Metadata Server will be generally available later this year as part of the Hawk release of the IBM WebSphere Information Integration (WII) platform. WebSphere Metadata Server provides metadata management as a service to products in the WII platform and provides a common metadata services infrastructure for metadata initiatives in other IBM software brands.
SOAs have attracted a lot of attention over the past two years, and many expect 2006 to be the year when SOAs move from pilot programs to mainstream production. Analysts predict that in the next two years SOAs will provide the basis for the majority of new development projects.
SOA owes its primary benefits (flexibility, ubiquity, and reusability) to the role standards and metadata play in its design. Many information management projects similarly leverage metadata to speed development cycles and improve information understanding. In these projects, the value of metadata is magnified when different types and sources of metadata are linked together and reconciled.
