Master Data and Reference Data in Data Lake Ecosystems

The data lake relies more on the data‐governance domain than the analytics domain in the information system. This chapter presents the concepts of master data management (MDM) and reference data management, and then, discusses their roles in the data lake concept and the values they bring. The MDM concept comes from organizations that are experiencing issues and difficulties around consistent reporting, regulatory compliance and all cross‐projects based on data. This has prompted a great deal of interest in MDM. Master data can be described by the way it interacts with other data. In transaction systems, master data is almost always involved with transactional data. As cardinality (the number of elements in a set) decreases, the likelihood of an element being treated as a master data element (even a commonly accepted subject area, such as the customer) decreases.