Shanc vs OpenMetadata

A catalog you populate, or a layer that populates itself.

OpenMetadata ingests technical metadata and gives you a place to document it — by hand. Shanc infers the business meaning automatically, keeps it current, and serves it to an agent that can query it.

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Side by side

ShancOpenMetadata

Fills in business meaningAutomaticallyBy hand — you write it

CoverageAs complete as your dataAs complete as what people write

Stays currentAuto-refresh on schema and query changesDrifts unless someone maintains it

Generates and validates queriesYesNo — built for humans to browse

Consumed by an agentMCP layer an agent queriesSystem of record for people

What's different

Meaning inferred, not typed

OpenMetadata ingests the technical metadata but leaves the business meaning — what a table is for, what a metric means — for people to fill in. Shanc infers that meaning from your query logs and code, so coverage isn't limited to what someone found time to document.

No glossary to keep alive

A catalog is only as current as its maintainers. Descriptions and glossary terms drift the moment the warehouse changes. Shanc refreshes on every schema and query change, so the layer stays true without a maintenance rota.

For agents, not just for browsing

OpenMetadata is built for people to browse tables and lineage. Shanc is built for an agent to consume over MCP and generate grounded SQL — a queryable layer, not a reference people click through.

It validates, a catalog doesn't

A catalog can tell you a table exists. It can't check that an agent's query used it correctly. Shanc validates every query against the layer before it runs.