Enterprise Metadata Portal

 

Have you ever wanted to consolidate your different Subject Areas to provide an enterprise metadata perspective? 

Do you have items of the same type with the same name in multiple Subject Areas preventing consolidation? 

Do you want to continue keeping your Subject Areas separate while allowing access across them? 

 RoAccess contains new functionality that will:

 

Following is a scenario that describes the situation some Rochade customers encounter.

I want to provide my company with the big picture showing all data models, databases, hardware, and software and how each component interacts with others.  I’ve brought my data models into separate Subject Areas so access can be granted at the Subject Area level.  But I also want to show everything in one view so I can do impact analysis across the enterprise or to create an inventory of enterprise data.  Unfortunately, all our data models were supporting specific applications and certain entities are represented in more than one model.

For example, I have a customer table in one data model.  Another data model also contains a different customer table.  Both are defined differently, but they contain information about the customer.  One model may be for an application developed in-house and another may be depicting a purchased application.  To depict the two instances of the Customer table from two different models, I had to create a different Subject Area for each.  If I tried to import both models into the same Subject Area, the instance in the second import overwrote the instance first imported.

Now I have a dilemma.  How do I create one view that shows both Customer tables?  Here’s how it is done in RoAccess:

Create a RoAccess Virtual Hierarchy in RoAccess to provide the Enterprise Portal in which to see your other Subject Areas.  The top level of the hierarchy is a Subject Area where links are built between items included in the hierarchy subordinate Subject Areas.  Additional metadata not appearing in the subordinate Subject Areas is also stored in the Enterprise Portal Subject Area.  All item types from the subordinate Subject Areas need to be included in the RIM for the portal Subject Area.

The items in the subordinate Subject Areas need to be renamed to ensure there are not more than one with the same name.  A new RoAccess renaming process exists to rename items in one or more Subject Area item types.  This process puts a suffix on the back of each item name to make it unique.  For the scenario above, it is recommended to put a short suffix such as the abbreviated source Subject Area, so each item can be distinguished from another.  Examples would be Customer_Table_CUS, Customer_Table_BLG, and Customer_Table_PRD

Cross Reference item types in the portal Subject Area can be created to hold the links to the related items in the subordinate Subject Areas.  If the subordinate Subject Areas are populated by buses, then put the link item type and attributes in the Enterprise Portal Subject Area RIM.  This protects the new metadata item types and attributes when an upgrade is applied to the system. 

In the following example, an item type named XREF in included in the Enterprise Portal Subject Area.  An item called Customer has been created.  A link attribute to tables has been created and the link between all three customer tables is built in the Customer cross reference item.  Note that the links to the different Customer Tables are contained in the Portal Subject Area, so when you replace the underlying scanner build Subject Areas, the links will remain!

 

 
The virtual hierarchy has another benefit when versioning Subject Areas.  For example, if I have built the portal Subject Area containing my links to items, I want the links to remain when I bring in a new version of my subordinate Subject Areas.  All I need to do is replace the Subject Area configuration number in the virtual hierarchy after the subordinate Subject Area has been renamed.  The links remain in the portal.

Using these new pieces of RoAccess functionality provide my company with the ability to see all their metadata and I can provide the consolidated view without having to move all the metadata into one Subject Area.