While there are many concepts, techniques and tools for metadata management, most focus on sub-aspects, e.g., metadata management with semantic technologies. There is no common understanding of what comprehensive metadata management in an enterprise entails and how it can be implemented. It is the goal of this project to design concepts and techniques for comprehensive metadata management across the entire enterprise data landscape.

As enterprises shift their business to be data-driven and incorporate initiatives such as industry 4.0, data lakes become increasingly popular as data management platforms for heterogeneous data. However, at the time of this project, data lakes were a new and thus not mature concept with various opposing definitions and only high-level considerations regarding its realization. The guiding question of this research project therefore is as follows: How can a data lake be set up and realized to support the needs of an enterprise?