Data, Metadata, and Knowledge Are Not The Same Thing
Updated
•1 min read
The data industry often treats these concepts as interchangeable.
They’re not.
Data tells you what exists.
Metadata tells you what it means.
Knowledge tells you how it’s actually used.
That’s the layer many organizations are missing.
A senior engineer knows:
· which joins are trusted
· which metrics are approved
· which mappings are outdated
· which paths should never be used
Very little of that information exists in schemas.
Even less exists in catalogs.
As AI becomes a primary interface for analytics, the gap becomes more obvious.
Models can process data.
Models can consume metadata.
But knowledge remains difficult to capture.
The next generation of enterprise analytics may depend on solving that problem.
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