Guide to customizing the Knowledge Accelerators

Knowledge Accelerators customization guidelines

The Knowledge Accelerators consist of a wide-ranging and comprehensive set of business terms and other governance artefacts for several industries.

Given that these accelerators can consist of many 10’s of 1000’s of business terms, a key question is how can you efficiently use this content to address the specific subset of business topics that are pertinent to you at any one time.

Consider three different approaches when you are looking to customize the content.

Directly change the Knowledge Accelerators content inline. Link
Place the Knowledge Accelerators content in a “development” vocabulary separated from the main stream “enterprise vocabulary”. Link
Use the importable business scopes. Link

Watch this video, which describes approaches to customize the Knowledge Accelerators.

Video disclaimer: This video provides a visual method to learn the concepts and tasks in this documentation. Some minor steps and graphical elements in this video may differ from your Cloud Pak for Data deployment.

Directly change the KA Content inline

This method is where you download the Knowledge Accelerators content and make any necessary changes directly.

Pros

Little or no extra workload for the administrator or data stewards.
The full range of industry content is available for assignment as part of metadata enrichment, which improves the likelihood of term assignments to columns.

Cons

The full Knowledge Accelerators content is visible to all users irrespective of whether it is relevant to your organizations business or not. Such a wide range of content can be confusing or overwhelming to the ordinary business user.
No assumed governance approach to making different parts of the Knowledge Accelerators content available for use by the business users.

Overall approach

The relevant Knowledge Accelerator content is imported into IBM Knowledge Catalog. The relevant admins and data stewards then make the necessary changes to the Knowledge Accelerators content. The changes can include renaming, changing, or deleting various Knowledge Accelerators business terms and categories.

In addition, this single vocabulary is what is used as the target for any term assignments during the metadata enrichment process.

Use a separate development vocabulary

This option is where you place the Knowledge Accelerators content in a category that is not visible to the bulk of business users and only copies or moves the specific Knowledge Accelerators business terms that are identified as necessary by the business.

Pros

Only the Knowledge Accelerators business terms that are relevant to the business are made visible to the regular business users.
Overall proposed approach for the promotion of the necessary business terms.

Cons

Requires the maintenance of two separate category hierarchies.
The bulk movement of many terms from the development to the enterprise vocabulary is not a default option.

Overall approach

The Knowledge Accelerators content is imported into a specific “Development” category hierarchy.
Visibility to this category hierarchy is limited only to admin users and data stewards.
The Data Stewards work with relevant Business Representatives to agree and create the necessary category structure for the enterprise vocabulary. This vocabulary is visible to the various business users.
For each project or initiative, the Data Steward and Business Representatives identify in the Development Vocabulary the specific Knowledge Accelerators business terms that the business users require.
For each of the Knowledge Accelerators business terms identified, the Data Steward changes the primary category for the selected terms to move them to the enterprise vocabulary.
The business then uses the enterprise vocabulary as part of daily activities, for example, the use of these terms in the Term Assignment step of the Meta Data Enrichment process.

Use the separately importable business scopes

This approach is where you import the subset of separate Knowledge Accelerators business scopes that most closely matches the business topics that are being addressed.

Pros

The organization can avail of pre-defined industry content that is delivered in more management groupings.
It is possible to import terms in groups that pertain to specific business topics.

Cons

When terms are imported as part of different scopes, only some of the term to term relationships are preserved.
When you are importing specific business scopes, there are likely to be warning errors during the import process, which can be ignored.

Overall approach

Using the document that outlines the contents of each scope, determine which scopes are needed for the immediate project area or initiative. See Knowledge Accelerators Business Scopes available for separate import.
Import the relevant business scopes into IBM Knowledge Catalog.
Determine whether the business scopes are to be customized directly inline or as part of a separate development vocabulary.
As needed in the future, import subsequent business scopes to address other business areas.