Continuous Metadata Integration: The Next Evolution of Data Modelling

How Work-in-Progress Modelling Evolved into a Modern Metadata Engineering Discipline (part of the Model-Driven Data Architecture Series)

💡 Summary

Before Git and CI/CD pipelines transformed software engineering, data modelers in Dutch financial institutions had already mastered a disciplined form of version control.

A senior data modeler introduced Work-in-Progress (WiP) Modelling — a structured process for managing changes to enterprise data models under tight governance and audit constraints.

Today, as we build metadata-driven data architectures in VSCode, the same principles of isolation, validation, and controlled integration resurface in a modern, automated form.
We call this evolution Continuous Metadata Integration (CMI) — a bridge between classical data modeling discipline and DevOps agility.

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🧭 Where It All Began

WiP Modelling wasn’t a feature of any tool — it was a way of working, born in the highly governed data environments of Dutch banks.

Its goal: protect the integrity of the corporate data model while allowing multiple modelers to…