Data is an important asset of an organization and metadata is the key to unlock the value from that asset. It provides crucial context to turn data into information and powers not just the current limited use cases of data discovery, and governance, but also emerging use cases related to data quality, observability, and most importantly people collaboration.
Poorly organized metadata is preventing organizations from realizing the full potential of data. Metadata is incorrect, inconsistent, stale, often missing, and fragmented in silos across various disconnected tools in proprietary formats obscuring a holistic picture of data.
## **OpenMetadata is an Open standard for metadata with a centralized metadata store that unifies all the data assets and metadata end-to-end to power data discovery, user collaboration, and tool interoperability.**
* **Metadata schemas** - defines core abstractions and vocabulary for metadata with schemas for Types, Entities, Relationships between entities. This is the foundation of the Open Metadata Standard.
* **Metadata store** - stores metadata graph that connects data assets, user and tool generated metadata.
* **Metadata APIs** - for producing and consuming metadata built on schemas for User Interfaces and Integration of tools, systems, and services.
* **Ingestion framework** - a pluggable framework for integrating tools and ingesting metadata to the metadata store. Ingestion framework already supports well know data warehouses - Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Apache Hive, and databases - MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and MSSQL.
* **OpenMetadata User Interface** - one single place for users to discover, and collaborate on all data.
