A system that aggregates and organizes metadata from decentralized data sources, balancing local autonomy with centralized data discovery. Federation can be achieved through different mechanisms, such as employing crawlers to periodically retrieve and consolidate participant Data Catalogues into a locally cached repository or leveraging Federated Search to query multiple Data Catalogues in real time and present unified results. Both approaches ensure enterprise-wide data visibility, governance, and collaboration while maintaining robust and responsive functionality.