  Large organizations today are being served by different types of data
processing and informations systems, ranging from the operational (OLTP)
systems, data warehouse systems, to data mining and business intelligence
applications. It is important to create an integrated repository of what these
systems contain and do in order to use them collectively and effectively. The
repository contains metadata of source systems, data warehouse, and also the
business metadata. Decision support and business analysis require extensive and
in-depth understanding of business entities, tasks, rules and the environment.
The purpose of business metadata is to provide this understanding. Realizing
the importance of metadata, many standardization efforts has been initiated to
define metadata models. In trying to define an integrated metadata and
information systems for a banking application, we discover some important
limitations or inadequacies of the business metadata proposals. They relate to
providing an integrated and flexible inter-operability and navigation between
metadata and data, and to the important issue of systematically handling
temporal characteristics and evolution of the metadata itself.
  In this paper, we study the issue of structuring business metadata so that it
can provide a context for business management and decision support when
integrated with data warehousing. We define temporal object-oriented business
metadata model, and relate it both to the technical metadata and the data
warehouse. We also define ways of accessing and navigating metadata in
conjunction with data.
