Introduction
OpenMetadata is a unified metadata platform that provides data discovery, lineage, documentation, data quality and observability. It centralizes metadata storage and offers connectors and ingestion frameworks to collect metadata across a wide range of data sources, helping teams manage data assets, access, and pipelines from a single view.
Key features
- Central metadata repository for tables, topics, dashboards and data products.
- Wide connector ecosystem for ingestion from warehouses, messaging systems and BI tools.
- Column-level lineage, data dictionaries and collaborative annotations.
- Extensible APIs and SDKs for integration and automation.
Use cases
- Data catalog and discovery for teams to locate and understand assets.
- Governance and compliance through lineage, auditing and access control.
- Platform integration where metadata is the central layer connecting storage, compute and BI tools.
Technical characteristics
- Multi-language stack (TypeScript/Java/Python) with modular architecture for enterprise deployments.
- Rich documentation and sandbox instances for rapid evaluation.
- Apache 2.0 licensing and broad industry adoption.