A key benefit of discovering and documenting Metadata about the physical assets is to provide information on how data is transformed as it moves between systems. Many Metadata tools carry information about what is happening to the data within their environments and provide capabilities to view the lineage across the span of the systems or applications they interface. The current version of the lineage based on programming code is referred to as ‘As Implemented Lineage’. In contrast, lineage describe in mapping specification documents is referred to as ‘As Designed Lineage’.

The limitations of a lineage build are based on the coverage of the Metadata management system. Function-specific Metadata repositories or data visualization tools have information about the data lineage within the scope of the environments they interact with but will not provide visibility to what is happening to the data outside their environments.

Metadata management systems import the ‘As Implemented’ lineage from the various tools that can provide this lineage detail and then augment the data lineage with the ‘As Designed’ from the places where the actual implementation details is not extractable. The process of connecting the pieces of the data lineage referred to as stitching. It results in a holistic visualization of the data as it moves from its original locations (official source or system of record) until it lands in its final destination.

This figure shows a sample data element lineage. In reading this, the ‘Total Backorder’ business data element, which is physically implemented as column zz_total, depends on 3 other data elements: ‘Units Cost in Cents’ physically implemented as ‘yy_unit_cost’, ‘Tax in Ship to State’ implemented in ‘yy_tax’ and ‘Back Order Quantity’ implemented in ‘yy_qty’.