What is Metadata Management? Explain Integrated Metadata Management with a block diagram.

Metadata management can be defined as the end-to-end process and governance framework for creating, controlling, enhancing, attributing, defining and managing a metadata schema, model or other structured aggregation system, either independently or within a repository and the associated supporting processes.
The purpose of Metadata management is to support the development and administration of data warehouse infrastructure as well as analysis of the data of time.
Metadata widely considered as a promising driver for improving effectiveness and efficiency of data warehouse usage, development, maintenance and administration. Data warehouse usage can be improved because metadata provides end users with additional semantics necessary to reconstruct the business context of data stored in the data warehouse.
Integrated Metadata:
An integrated Metadata Management supports all kinds of users who are involved in the data warehouse development process. End users, developers and administrators can use/see the Metadata. Developers and administrators mainly focus on technical Metadata but make use of business Metadata if they want. Developers and administrators need metadata to understand transformations of object data and underlying data flows as well as the technical and conceptual system architecture.

Several Metadata management systems are in existence. One such system/ tool is Integrated Metadata Repository System (IMRS). It is a metadata management tool used to support a corporate data management function and is intended to provide metadata management services. Thus, the IMRS will support the engineering and configuration management of data environments incorporating e-business transactions, complex databases, federated data environments, and data warehouses / data marts. The metadata contained in the IMRS used to support application development, data integration, and the system administration functions needed to achieve data element semantic consistency across a corporate data environment, and to implement integrated or shared data environments.