Curious MDM Activity, and Differentiating between Master and Reference Data

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From the Blogosphere

Curious MDM Activity, and Differentiating between Master and Reference Data

November 13, 2006 3:09 PM
From Blog: David Loshin

Last week at the TDWI conference in orlando, I had the chance to briefly chat with Phillip Russom, who has assembled some very nice research papers this year on data quality and on master data management. One comment about his latest effort on MDM that I found intriguing was that his research suggested that a large number of MDM projects are done on behalf of finance activities, often in the area of accounting (GL, chart of accounts, item lists, etc.). I thought a large part of that data was what we might call "reference data," not necessarily "master data." One the one hand, it is good to see that the kinds of governance that are relevant for financial activities being applied to data.

However, his comment drives back to a question I must have heard 10 times down there - what is the difference between master data and reference data? This underlies an even more challenging question - how do you define "master data"? We have a lot of descriptions of master data, but nothing definitive. Dan Linstedt has done a good job of tracking some of these questions in his blog, but I think it is about time to nail this definition down. Any suggestions?

[ Read the entire post at Blog: David Loshin ]