Who supplies metadata to facilitate use of FOCUS conformed data?

• A. Data providers
• B. End users
• C. External auditors
• D. Marketing teams

Answer: (A)

Metadata is the descriptive information about data that tells you what the data means, how it’s structured, where it came from, when it was collected, and how it was transformed. The party that supplies this metadata to enable the use of conformed data is the data providers. They own the data and define its context: the schema, data types, units, valid values, and the transformation rules used to harmonize data from multiple sources. By providing this metadata alongside the data or in a data catalog, they enable downstream users to interpret, validate, and reliably combine data from different sources.

End users might add notes or annotations, and external auditors may verify metadata for compliance, but they don’t originate the core metadata used to understand and consume the conformed data. Marketing teams aren’t responsible for supplying this technical metadata.