Metadata approach in modeling multi structured data collection using object oriented concepts

In designing an enterprise wide system, a system architect must consider different concerns of the stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a generic metadata approach for modeling data with multi structure representations derived from different points of view of the stakeholders. The notion of structures/organizational views of data is separated from the collection of the data itself. We introduce two layers of the generic metamodel: (1) dataset: real data handled as a collection; (2) viewpoint: a more abstract layer describing the many structures/metadata for each point of view. The idea of datasets and viewpoints are adopted from the concepts of abstract and concrete class in object oriented modeling. To validate the generic model, we provide several case studies. We expect the proposed model provides a better architectural way of thinking in modeling an enterprise.