The Department of the Army has issued a memorandum providing guidance on registering metadata in the Army Data Catalog, or ADC.
Leonel Garciga, chief information officer of the Army and a 2024 Wash100 awardee, signed the memo on June 11.
The ADC serves as the Army’s centralized metadata registry for all authoritative data of the service branch and is designed to publish and store metadata to meet the branch’s data-sharing needs.
The memo requires all functional data managers — a.k.a. FDMs — to register and maintain all identified authoritative system and data asset metadata in the ADC, except for those granted exemption by mission area data officers or data stewards.
According to the document, FDMs and data stewards must carry out their responsibilities to identify, approve and register authoritative data sets and data products for their domains through the ADC to ensure that those assets are discoverable across the Army enterprise.
The guidance states that an FDM is responsible for determining whether a data set meets a documentation standard to achieve the data steward-approved guidelines for quality and for initiating designation using the Data Product Designation workflow in the ADC.
According to the memo, system owners should register their data dictionaries in the ADC.