ArchiGraph.MDMsemantic MDM solution

ArchiGraph.MDM: the purpose and the principles

ArchiGraph.MDM is a platform intended for ontology-based data management. It can store and manage the structure of the corporate data, reference and master data, used by the corporate applications. Even the transactional data and time series may be stored in this system, if several components need to access them.

ArchiGraph.MDM is intended for using as a core of the complex automated systems, including:

• situation centers,
• integrated analytical systems and logical data warehouses,
• reporting systems etc.

ArchiGraph.MDM can serve as the corporate Data Governance tool in the complex, integrated environments consisting of dozens of business applications.

Any enterprise works in the constantly changing environment: new regulatory requirements are emerging, technologies and markets are developing. This leads to creation of the new entity types and properties in the corporate data model. A corporate data management system shall be able to provide flexibility of the data model and offer it to the applied components in the machine-readable form. The ontologies (Semantic Web technology stack) offers a way of achieving this. The semantically-enabled MDM becomes an RDS (Reference Data Service).

An ontologies-enabled MDM has the following advantages:

• It can store data of the very complex structure, consisting of thousands of entity types. This allows to describe the subject area without excessive simplification and information losses.
• The data structure management becomes simple since with ontologies the data is not separated technically from its structure. The ontologies-enabled system can react on the requirements changes much faster.
• An ontologies-enabled MDM can manage the behavior of the applied components by storing their algorithms and settings. This allows to reduce costs and prices of software development.

Functionality

ArchiGraph.MDM has the following functions:

• storage of the ontological data model which includes definitions of the classes, properties and relations. Ontologies allows creating types hierarchies with the inheritance of properties applicability, application of the same properties to the entities of the different types;
• ontology data model management with API;
• access to the data objects with the API (read, write, group operations);
• geospatial data processing;
• data dispersion between several storages (RDF triple stores, relational databases, MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase etc) allows choosing the most appropriate way of storing the data of different nature and access optimization with indexing, caching and segmentation. The client applications are completely agnostic of the data storage details;
• data and model access control using class-based rules, effective access level calculation with respect to the inheritance and multiple classification;
• data access logging and administrative tool for logs analysis;
• making requests for data changes and the process of requests approval/rejection;
• subscription on notifications of data updates with Message Queues;
• data lineage support - ability to recover data object state for any moment of time and to get changes log;
• model lineage history - ability to recover model state for any moment of time.

ArchiGraph.MDM allows execution of the listed operations through the APIs and transports/protocols:

• REST;
• GraphQL;
• SPARQL (only SELECT queries currently);
• websocket;
• exchange through message queues (RabbitMQ, Kafka).

ArchiGraph.MDM supports the fault-tolerant cluster mode. The cluster may include any number of instances of MDM (including instances in the Kubernetes containers). The storages used by ArchiGraph.MDM can be clustered in turn.

ArchiGraph.MDM management tools

ArchiGraph.MDM has its own administration panel for managing storages, access rights etc. The data model can be edited by the analyst with the ontology editor ArchiGraph.Mir. The particular data management tools are also installed as plugins to the ArchiGraph.KMS system. They offer the next functions:

• ArchiGraph.KMS allows creating and executing rules for duplicated data objects search according to the conditions set by the analyst. There is also an interface for duplicates review and merge.
• The ArchiGraph.MDM administrative console allows defining of the access rules of the user groups to the classes of the model. One of the access levels if the “edit with confirmation”. If a user or a client access component with such rights tries to edit any data or model element, the changes request is created by the system. A special interface allows to review, apply or reject these requests.
• The data and the model can be exported/imported through the Excel files.
• The ontology editor allows to view the log of changes in the data and model.