Data Catalogs - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - Maximize the Good, Avoid the Bad and Ugly

Data catalogs have great promise: They can provide the businessperson, analyst, architect, system engineer, and data scientist alike with the ability to look for data and understand what it contains. However, they are not magic. They require proper curation and a good understanding of data/metadata, privacy/security, and technical ecosystem to be effective. This talk illustrates some of the common pitfalls of data catalog implementation and how you can avoid them.

The attendee will learn:

• What a data catalog is … and what it isn’t
• The Good: Leveraging the data catalog for Data Quality
• The Bad: Misunderstandings about data and Metadata
• The Ugly: Cinderella’s Stepsister’s Foot Syndrome: how to avoid it
• And more: Architecture/System Fitness and Security
• Data provenance and Technical Lineage Harvesting

Speakers: Bonnie O'Neil and Shyla Kennedy

Bonnie O'Neil 

Bonnie O'Neil is a well-known expert on all phases of data architecture including data quality, business metadata, and governance. She is a regular speaker at many conferences and has also been a workshop leader at the EDW conference. In addition, she was the keynote speaker at a conference on Data Quality in South Africa.

She has been involved in strategic data management projects in both Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, and her expertise includes specialized skills such as descriptive analytics and semantic data integration. She is the author of four books, including "The Data Catalog: Sherlock Holmes Data Sleuthing for Analytics," and over 50 articles and technical white papers.

Bonnie is a Principal Data Management Engineer at The MITRE Corporation.

Shyla Kennedy

Shyla Kennedy is an experienced data professional and capability builder who has spent her career solving complex problems for large organizations. She has built and redesigned enterprise-wide data capabilities; incorporated emerging privacy practices into existing disciplines; managed ERP, and other cross-organizational software projects, and developed solutions to resolve multibillion-dollar accounting issues. She specializes in getting to the root of issues that are often at odds with pre-defined solutions.