Information Catalog Manager Administration Guide

Chapter 5. Expanding and automating your information catalog

As you build your information catalog, you will probably find that you need ways to expand it and automate your processes for maintaining it. You might want to exchange objects with otherinformation catalogs or combine the contents of one information catalog with another. For example, you might decide to centralize some of your metadata, or make the contents of your information catalog available to another organization. You might want to exchange Information Catalog Manager metadata with metadata from other products.

The Information Catalog Manager provides tag language for working with large amounts of descriptive data at one time and for exchanging objects among information catalogs to coordinate multiple information catalogs.

• A tag language file can contain descriptive data that you:
  • Export from another information catalog (see Exporting metadata)
  • Extract from another source (see Extracting descriptive data from other sources)
  • Write using any word processing program (see Performing Information Catalog Manager tasks with the user interface or tag language)
  • Exchange with products that generate Information Catalog Manager tag language (see Publishing and synchronizing metadata)
  • Exchange with another product that produces metadata that conforms to the Metadata Interchange Specification (MDIS) (see Exchanging MDIS-conforming metadata with other products)
• A tag language file can comprise deletions you logged in one information catalog that you want to include in otherinformation catalogs (see Logging deletions from your information catalog).

You can import a tag language file that contains descriptive data that you want to include in an information catalog. See Importing tag language files for more information.