RAND Metadata Management System (RMMS). A Metadata Storage Facility to SupportData Interoperability, Reuse, and Sharing

摘要

The RAND Metadata Management System (RMMS) is a system that manages metadata.Metadata denotes definitional and descriptional information about databases, simulation models, and procedures. Databases, such as those maintained in the INGRES database management system (DBMS) by the Military Operations Simulation Facility (MOSF), are prevalent throughout RAND. Similarly, many prominent simulation models are exercised regularly in the MOSF and require input data extracted from INGRES databases. However, most of these databases have little documentation or other descriptional information to go along with them. The absence of such information leaves users at a loss for understanding the definitions, abbreviations, acronyms, and descriptions of the pieces of data stored and maintained in a DBMS. This report presents the design of the RMMS, a metadata management system for relational databases. Our goal was to produce a design document that could be used both by the users of MOSF relational databases (who may be future users of RMMS) and by users of other relational databases who would like to develop a similar RMMS metadata repository for their own set of databases. This work was motivated by the proliferation of databases stored and used in the MOSF and by a realization by the MOSF database management staff that such metadata is at least as important as, if not more important than, the actual data values. Although a management system typically includes facilities for user interaction and maintenance, in this document we focus primarily on the metadata storage structures within RMMS. Detailed discussion of user interface and maintenance designs is beyond the scope of this report.