Meta Grid: a status

See you at the Data Day Texas Final Edition

Lynn Bender, organizer of Data Day Texas, did not provide me with a thumbnail without my big nose. You will have to live with that.

I’m going to be at Data Day Texas 2026, the final edition.

Last year, I had the honor of the opening keynote. And while that was truly an honor, and logic in the sense that my idea of the Meta Grid had gained quite some attention, I return this year to reflect on the finalized set of ideas published in Fundamentals of Metadata Management. So, it’s a presentation with no slides, but diagrams from my book.

I have something to say about the reality of metadata management, that you normally don’t see on glossy slides and fancy paper. A reality I think we all should be talking about a little more. Your seven data catalogs, three configuration management databases and four asset management systems. And how all the metadata in them overlap.

No Meta Grid talk without a meta perspective. I also want to discuss this:

Can you create attention without hype, in a community that is (forced to be) driven by hype? Can you discuss technology with technologists all while claiming that more technology (really) isn’t the answer to the problems, technology created in the first place? Can you maintain the message, that despite whatever new technology is invented, pen and paper is sometimes all you need to understand where you are going, in a world of fixed, clashing metamodels?

These are some of the thoughts I had while writing Fundamentals of Metadata Management and communicating my ideas. We are caught up in a very complicated frame talking about something that is in fact pretty simple: Metadata repositories create overviews of IT landscapes. And these overviews overlap. And that’s the problem.

But we can fix it.

See you