Welcome to Metaphor

The Metaphor Metadata Platform represents the next evolution of the Data Catalog - it combines best-in-class Technical Metadata (learned from building DataHub at LinkedIn) with Behavioral and Social Metadata. It supercharges an organization’s ability to democratize data with state-of-the-art data governance, data literacy, and data enablement capabilities. It provides an extremely intuitive user interface that turns even the most non-technical user into a fan of the catalog.

The Metadata platform is designed for both data team members, including data and analytics engineers, and consumers of data, including business analysts, data scientists, BI users, etc.

Metaphor pulls metadata from several areas of the data stack—data warehouses, data lakes, ETL tools, data transformation, and data quality tools, as well as BI dashboards. Via its web interface, Metaphor analyses this technical metadata and provides users an easy way to search for datasets they are interested in and look at technical statistics about the data, its lineage, and utilization.

In addition to technical metadata, Metaphor lets users create simple, short posts known as Knowledge Cards about how they use data. Users across the organization can tap into this resource of posts written by their colleagues, written in a form more familiar to them (using the language of business) rather than harder-to-decipher technical terms.

The Metaphor Slack application is another useful app that lets users reference assets such as datasets, dashboards, and more, in their conversation, thus providing far richer metadata about the asset to the user. It also lets users tag a slack conversation and convert it into a post within Metaphor.