In this podcast, an interesting categorization of data is given by Malcom Chisholm.
In brief, there are six types of data:
- Meta Data (e.g. tables names…)
- Reference Data (e.g. code tables…)
- Enterprise Structure Data (hierarchical enterprise organization of data, e.g. product line…)
- Transaction Structure Data (e.g. customer, product data…)
- Transaction Activity Data (transactional event data, e.g. orders…)
- Transaction Audit Data (states changes in transactional event data, e.g. logs…)
Master data are then the aggregation of reference data, enterprise structure data and transaction structure data. This means that there is not only one category of master data. Thus the meaning of the different types of master data must be taken into account in any good MDM tool.
