Business-driven SOA

Align business & IT through semantic integration.

Collibra's solution enables you to define, manage and govern your information model on a business level. It allows you to capture the semantics of your business and automatically generate technical canonical models (UML, XSD, OWL, ...), data transformation and semantic validation services.

Add semantics and business context to your SOA architecture to reduce complexity, increase agility, and improve governance.

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Semantic Data Integration and Governance

Bringing people and systems closer together

The ultimate goal of a service oriented architecture is to unify the existing application stove-pipes and build an infrastructure on which it is easy to combine existing and build new application. All large software vendors provide you with the core infrastructure messaging, routing, adapters, service governance, etc. The information part of your infrastructure however has not received the attention it needs. When moving from a stove-pipe approach to a unified approach, your information model expands to encompass all different services. This is a challenge standard software products are not prepared for.

Collibra helps to manage this challenge by involving all stakeholders, business and IT, to define and govern your enterprise information model.

Benefits

Reduce risk and costs, improve business / IT alignment, and increase your SOA project's succes by:

  • Removing interpretation conflicts,
  • Avoiding unnecessary debate,
  • Involving the business in defining and governing your enterprise information model on a business level,
  • Automatically generating your technical canonical data models in UML or XSD.
  • Leveraging these business definition by automatically generating data integration and validation services to deploy on your existing middleware,
  • Improve governance and compliance.

Relevant articles

Capture the semantics of your SOA business domain

The core of Collibra’s approach is to separate the meaning from the structure of the shared information model. Doing so enables all stakeholders to understand the shared model, increases flexibility through additional de-coupling, and promotes governance and manageability by enabling each stakeholder to govern its own interest.

Organizations often make the mistake to incorporate application-specific structure and syntax to data models that are instead meant to capture the shared semantics of different applications. The best-practice using canonical models, for example, often fails because these shared or canonical models are created in UML or XML, which are very technical models that do not sufficiently capture the business semantics.

OMG has recognized the gap between technical models and business-level models that capture the semantics of the domain. The recently published SBVR standard (Semantics for Business Vocabulary and Business Rules), fills this gap by clearly defining the shared business vocabulary, facts, and rules of domain. Collibra's Business Semantics Glossary is the first industry-ready product to enable business and technical stakeholders to capture and govern their business fact using this open standard, and at the same time automatically generating technical models in XML, UML or OWL.

Link your business semantics to technical models and web-services

Collibra's Business Semantics Studio enables IT professionals to create semantic, context-aware mappings between existing applications, data sources (XML, UML, Databases, ...) and web-services and the shared business semantics. These business semantics are modeling your business context on a business level using OMG's SBVR standard. In a way, you are bringing the business context into your existing applications and data sources.

These semantic mappings unique in two important ways:

  • Context-aware: You don't map one data model entity to another entity, Instead map one technical entity to a path in your business semantics that captures the entire business context. The result is a very simple business model (lower number of concepts), very strong expressiveness, increased flexibility and reuse because of using smaller, reusable building blocks.
  • Semantic: You don't map one data model onto another data model. Instead, you map a technical data model onto a semantic model with a graph structure underneath. This means you can import many existing models as your shared semantic model. You can import existing UML, XMl or even OWL models and use these as your shared canonical model. The result is increased model decoupling and flexibility wich lowers costs and complexity and increases reuse.

Generate semantic data transformation and validation services on your ESB.

The Business Semantics Enabler automatically generates data transformation and validation services
(eg. database to xml, xml to database, xml to xml, web-services, ...) on top of your existing infrastructure.

It is a run-time data transformation engine to provide semantic data integration in a SOA or Data Integration environment.

Features