Design a data hub with Semarchy xDM

Semarchy xDM is the intelligent data hub platform for master data management (MDM), reference data management (RDM), application data management (ADM), data quality, and data governance. It provides all the features for data quality, data validation, data matching, de-duplication, data authoring, workflows, and more.

Designing a data hub

When designing a data hub with Semarchy xDM, you:

  • Use the Application Builder to design and develop a data management project.

  • Design logical models defining your business entities and the rules that apply to these entities.

  • Design data management applications to browse and manage data in business entities.

  • Deploy the models and applications and access them in data locations.

Key features to design a data hub

Modeling framework

Semarchy xDM provides a fast and iterative modeling framework that simplifies the design of semantically complete enterprise data models. It enables collaboration between business users, data stewards, data champions and data architects for defining high-level concepts expressed using business terminology.

Data models act as the single point of logical definition of entities, attributes, relationships, and rules managed in the data hub.

The modeling framework supports:

  • Logical data modeling, which is the expression of the logical data model semantics and rules by business analysts. This includes:

    • The target data model (entities, attributes, relationships, lists of values, etc.).

    • The rules for data quality (validations, referential integrity validation, lists of values, etc.).

    • The data access privileges associated with user roles.

  • Certification process logical design, which includes:

    • The definition of applications that publish data to the hub (i.e., the publishers).

    • The rules to enrich and standardize data.

    • The rules to match and identify groups of similar records.

    • The survivorship rules to produce the reference data (i.e., golden data).

  • Applications design, which includes:

    • Creating, organizing, and branding user-facing applications.

    • Designing display cards, forms, and collections to display the data from the entities.

    • Designing search forms to search data.

    • Assembling the entities into compound business views.

    • Designing steppers for authoring data.

    • Designing duplicate managers to manually merge and split groups of similar records.

    • Creating workflows.

Version management

Semarchy xDM supports an infinite number of metadata versions. The collaborative process between the different governance teams sets the rules to close versions of models to keep full traceability or to run multiple projects in parallel.
During the modeling phase, the data architect and business analysts create their metadata definition until the first semantic data model is finished. This model is then frozen in an edition and eventually delivered to production. Subsequent iterations of the data model are automatically opened. This allows Semarchy xDM users to replay the entire cycle of metadata definition. At any time, project managers may choose to branch the developments in order to develop two versions of the model in parallel.

Data certification

Semarchy xDM supports integrating data from any source in batch mode, asynchronous or synchronous mode. The platform manages the life cycle of data published in the hub. This data is pushed by publishers through existing middleware (ETL, SOA, EAI, Data Integration, etc.). The platform provides standard APIs such as SQL for ETLs, REST API, etc for real-time publishing. The certification process follows a sequence of steps to produce and make available certified reference data (i.e., golden records). These steps apply all the logical rules defined in the modeling phase to certify at all times the integrity, quality and uniqueness of the reference data.

With plugins and REST clients, Semarchy xDM can delegate stages of the certification process to any component present in the information system infrastructure.

Data management applications

Semarchy xDM can generate data management applications. Applications provide secured and filtered access to the data stored in the hub using business-friendly Web interfaces. Applications also support data management operations and user collaboration.

Data consumption

The certified data is stored in a relational database, which allows Semarchy xDM to benefit from higher performance and scalability. The data is made available to consumers across multiple channels to allow a non-intrusive integration with the information system:

  • SQL access to data using JDBC or ODBC.

  • REST access to data.