"OpenMetadata: Building a Unified Data Catalog and Governance Layer" Modern data platforms fail less from lack of data and more from lack of trustworthy, actionable metadata. This book is written for experienced data engineers, analytics engineers, platform teams, and governance leaders who need more than a catalog UI-they need a metadata control plane that makes ownership, quality, lineage, security, and compliance operational at scale. You'll learn how OpenMetadata's standards-driven model turns scattered signals into a coherent governance system: designing service and asset boundaries, establishing ownership as an enforceable primitive, and extending the schema without creating "custom field chaos." The book goes deep on platform architecture (store, APIs, ingestion), production-grade connector strategy, and semantic governance (glossaries, domains, tiers, certifications) that survives real organizational entropy. It also shows how to implement executable workflows-identity, authorization, routing, approvals-and how to convert lineage, profiling, and tests into defensible compliance evidence and audit-ready narratives. Expect an implementation-oriented, systems-level treatment with operational playbooks for scale: idempotent automation patterns, change control for ingestion, impact analysis for change management, and upgrade planning tied to real version milestones. Familiarity with data platforms, APIs, and production operations is assumed.