Definitions
This section defines the terms used when creating MDM models.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Domain | A set of related entities that collectively describe a type of master data within an organization, for example Customer, Product or Supplier. |
| Multi-domain MDM tool | An MDM product, such as Talend, that is not specifically created to focus on a single domain and can therefore master multiple/any domains, concurrently if required. |
| Entity | In Talend, entity generally refers to a set of rules that a single record within Talend MDM must conform to. However, in the industry the term is often used interchangeably with what is defined as a super-entity – a set of entities with relations (often one to many) that collectively define an atomic unit of something. For example, it is common for a 'customer' (super-)entity to be physically modelled using multiple entities in the model – 'customer', 'address', 'customerXref', etc. The term entity is also sometimes used in the industry to describe a physical instance of an entity – for clarity, this article uses the term record for this. |
| Record | An instance of an entity – a physical record as represented at the MDM application level. This is an XML document. |
| MDM Physical Storage | A human readable, third normal form representation of the data held in the MDM hub. This is the physical storage of Talend MDM and is held in a relational database system. Normally, the data is not accessed at this layer, but rather via the MDM Application layer, which provides a layer of abstraction over the requirements of physical storage and governance rules. It must never be written to directly. Writes must go through the application layer, but read is allowed in limited circumstances. |
| Element | An XML element is the building block of an XML document. Each XML document contains one or more elements, the scope of which is either delimited by start and end tags, or by an empty-element tag for empty elements. Thus, in Talend MDM terminology, an element may be defined as being a simple type, in which case it holds data (or a foreign key), or as being a complex type, which holds other elements. |
| XML Simple Type (adapted from W3Schools) | A simple element is an XML element that can contain only text. It cannot contain any other elements or attributes. It can be one of the types included in the XML Schema definition: boolean, string, date, etc., or it can be a custom type that you can define yourself by extending the definition of one of the built-in types. |
| XML Complex Type (from W3Schools) | A complex type element is an XML element that contains other elements and/or attributes. |
| Lower Camel Case | Camel case is the practice of writing compound words or phrases so that each next word or abbreviation begins with a capital letter. With the Lower variation of the Camel Case, the first word/letter is lowercase, for example: 'iPhone', 'customer', 'customerXref' and 'refDataItem'. |
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