OpenMetadata

OpenMetadata is an open-source metadata management and data catalog platform designed to help organizations discover, understand, and govern their data assets. It provides a centralized repository for metadata and a set of tools to ingest, catalog, search, and govern data across the data landscape.

Key capabilities include automated ingestion of metadata from data sources such as data warehouses, databases, data pipelines, and BI tools; a searchable catalog of assets (tables, columns, dashboards, jobs), with support for lineage, tagging, and a user-defined glossary. The platform emphasizes data governance through role-based access control, stewardship assignments, and audit trails, enabling teams to document data definitions, owners, and data quality rules.

OpenMetadata offers lineage visualization and impact analysis to show how data flows between systems and how changes propagate. It exposes a REST API and a web UI, and can be extended via connectors to popular tools and platforms. In practice, it can ingest metadata from cloud warehouses (for example Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift), relational databases, data pipelines (dbt, Airflow), and various BI or analytics tools, consolidating metadata in a single place.

Deployment and architecture are modular, consisting of a metadata store, ingestion services, API layer, and a web user interface. It can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, with containerized installations (Docker) and Kubernetes support.

OpenMetadata is maintained as an open-source project with an active community contributing connectors, features, and documentation, aiming to standardize and democratize metadata across data ecosystems.