Subsections


Associate Data Automatically

The main characteristics of the Associate Data Automatically tool are:

To run the Associate Data Automatically tool, click the Associate Data button at the bottom of the Metadata Table view, and select Associate Data Automatically.

Your metadata table must be saved and a key column designated for the metadata table for this option to be available.

Select the data the tool should consider when setting up metadata associations in the window that appears. An example of this is shown in figure 3.16. You can select an item or sets of items in the navigation area on the left and move these into the selected elements list. Alternatively, you can right click on a folder and specify that all elements in the folder should be put in the selected elements list. This is illustrated in figure 3.17.

Image metadata_associate_data
Figure 3.16: Select data for automatic metadata association.

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Image select_all_data_in_folder
Figure 3.17: Selecting all data elements in a folder.

Specify a role that should be assigned to each data element that is associated to a metadata row (figure 3.18). The role can be anything that describes the data element best.

Image metadata_associate_data_role
Figure 3.18: Provide a role for the data elements. The default role provided is "Sample data".

Select whether the matching of the data element names to the entries in the key column should be based on exact or partial matching. These options are explained further below.

Image metadata_associate_data_matching
Figure 3.19: Data element names can be matched either exactly or partially to the entries in the key column.

Choose to Save the outputs. Data associations and roles will be saved for data elements where the name matches a key column entry according to the selected matching scheme.

Warning: It is safest only to select data elements that have no existing association to the metadata table being worked with, or carefully selecting any data elements with an existing association which you wish to update. All data selected that has an association with the metadata table being worked with will be updated by the automatic association tool. This means that any new or updated information in a metadata row can be added, but it also means that if no rows in the metadata match such a data element anymore, then the data association will be removed. This could happen if, for example, you changed the name of a data element with a metadata association, and did not change the corresponding key entry in the metadata table.


Matching schemes

A data element name must match an entry in the key column of a metadata table for an association to be set up between that data element at the corresponding row of the metadata table. Two schemes are available in the Association Data Automatically for matching up names with key entries:


Partial matching rules

For each data element being considered, the partial matching scheme involves breaking a data element name into components and searching for the best match from the key entries in the metadata table. In general terms, the best match means the longest key that matches entire components of the name.

The following describes the matching process in detail: