Metadata and Data Fabric
Large organizations have thousands of systems with competing and often conflicting names and definitions of data. The process of integrating data is complex and costly. The EKG is both metadata and data fabric, to find and access all your data, aligning multiple identities, names, definitions and meanings and allowing content to be understandable and usable by both humans and machines.
• Business Glossary
• Data Catalog
• Data API
Problem
Enterprise data comes from many disparate repositories and with different data structures, definitions and contextual meanings. A single version of truth is unobtainable. There is simply too much complexity for everything to be connected within a single repository across large and federated organizations.
Impact
The inability to find and use trusted data increases risk, limits productivity and organizational agility. Increased costs occur due to time spent finding the right data source, transforming, integrating and fixing incompatible data. In addition, many firms waste money on redundant data purchases and perform unnecessary data reconciliations.
Solution
The EKG facilitates multiple viewpoints of data including an integrated view. The standardization of meaning and rules facilitates automatic validation and provides assurance of data quality to end users. The ability to register data integration as machine-readable activities into the EKG generates full transparency across all your data processes. And the metadata capabilities of the EKG make it possible to embed executable business rules that accommodate different values, identities and definitions.
Business Glossary
A large investment bank with multiple lines of business has a variety of business glossary tools. They implement an EKG to semantically link equivalent concepts across business glossaries while preserving the ability of end users to view their data from different business and operational perspectives. It is now possible to use the EKG as the Rosetta Stone, translating terms between business areas and thus aiding communication and a firm-wide view of data.
Data Catalog
A European bank uses an EKG as a data catalog of physical datasets, databases and other content stores. The bank has many technologies for scanning its data infrastructure - however each software has strengths and weaknesses and own proprietary stores. The EKG is the single point for an enterprise-wide data catalog, allowing all representations to co-exist in both their own cataloging forms and the shared catalog. Using machine learning and graph analytics they identify, match and merge technical data terms to business glossary terms.
Data API
A financial data provider enables consumers of their data APIs to query securities, prices and company data. The APIs are built dynamically from metadata inside the EKG, allowing new end-points, data sources and calculations to be added quickly and without code change. The API documentation is automatically generated and delivered, while the full data lineage trail from API end-point to source data field is maintained so that data quality can be traced quickly to their data providers.