Books on Metadata Management and Semantics

OWL: Representing Information Using the Web Ontology Language
Lee W. Lacy
Tafford Publishing, 2004
This is the first book that is strictly focused on the OWL language.  Lacy does an nice job of introducing the foundational concepts behind OWL (XML, namespaces, RDF, RDFS) and then presenting OWL concepts on that.  My only complaint is that there are very few actual real-world examples in the book so you don't really see how the language elements are used in practice.  It is more of a well-written tutorial and language reference manual.

Common Warehouse Metamodel: An Introduction to the standard for Data Warehouse Integration
John Poole, Dan Chang, Douglas Tolbert, and David Mellor
OMG Press, Wiley Publishing Inc, 2002
The CWM standard is very large a complex standard and there is very little information about how it is actually used in practice.  But it is nonetheless a core technology that you need to understand if you are going to keep your metadata from being trapped by a single vendors solution. This is a non-technical book targeted and business analyst's and project managers that are familiar with metadata issues.

Common Warehouse Metamodel: Developer's Guide
John Poole, Dan Chang, Douglas Tolbert, and David Mellor
OMG Press, Wiley Publishing Inc, 2003
This is the technical companion to the Introductory CWM book but targeted at programmers rather than business analyst's and project managers.  It has a much more detailed discussion of CWM internals and also give sample programs in Java.  This book is really targeted at Java programmers.

Build and Managing the Meta Data Repository: A Full Lifecycle Guide
David Marco
Wiley Computer Publishing , 2000
Although this book is somewhat dated and very relational database centric, I must give Marco credit for all the efforts he made to publish one of the first books on metadata repositories.  Unfortunately you will not see any references to modern representations such as OWL and RDF.  This is a non-technical book targeted and business analyst's and project managers that are familiar with the concepts of a RDBMS.

Universal Meta Data Models
David Marco
Wiley Computer Publishing , 2000
Although this is a well written book, for a book published in 2004 with the word "universal" in the title, I expected a little more modern treatment of metadata. This book begins with the statement that Mr. Marco is the "world's foremost authority on metadata". And although I agree that the book does have several good points, it does not appear to be a well-rounded textbook on metadata. There are however several well-written sections on the relationship between the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and metadata and the process of creating data stewardship teams. I was disappointed that the book does not even mention ISO/IEC 11179, RDF, OWL or any other modern tuple-based metadata technologies. The book does however mention how to use COBOL REDEFINES, DASD and other mainframe techniques to use metadata. The central thesis of the book is that metadata can and should be stored in a relational databases. The argument is that although relational structure are sometimes limiting, the prevalence of SQL skill sets make it practical to use relational databases to store metadata. The book includes a CD with ERWIN™ files and a 30 day evaluation copy of ERWIN. The book also suffers from some formatting omissions such as the fact that most of the data models listed in the appendix lack titles.