IBM Knowledge Accelerators
Knowledge Accelerators offer pre-created, extensive, curated glossaries to improve data classification, regulatory compliance, self-service analytics, and other governance operations.
IBM Knowledge Accelerators help organize data along a common and known business vocabulary, in addition to automatically providing business context and definitions during the onboarding of regulatory and industry data content within IBM Knowledge Catalog. An extensive business vocabulary accelerates making data understandable and elevates your data catalog investment.
You can add Knowledge Accelerators to your governance framework if you have the IBM Knowledge Catalog Enterprise plan. For more information on the Enterprise plan, see IBM Knowledge Catalog service plans.
Watch this overview video introducing 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.
Business Core Vocabulary
This is the grouping of interconnected business terms that provide the enterprise with a standardized central vocabulary of business language to connect the various technical and IT users.
- have a range of defined properties
- can be related to each other and to other components
- are organized by categories aligned with key business-meaningful groupings
- help standardization and communication within a company
- enable users to create a common, enterprise-wide picture of data requirements and the associated business issues
- pre-integration with IBM Knowledge Catalog data classes means that the business terms in the Business Core Vocabulary can also represent a vital business layer to underpin Data Governance and self-service Business Intelligence
- definition of key business information that is used in day-to-day business operations and analysis
- provision of a consistent set of terms that can be used by both business and technical teams to describe the information in their physical environment
- as an initial contact point for most users and so it is imperative that the language creates a positive first impression of the overall IT environment's usefulness and quality
- help for business users in understanding information that is used by IT assets by allowing traceability between business terms and IT assets
- developed IT solutions that are driven by business requirements
Business Performance Indicators
Business Performance Indicators comprise high-level business information that is used by the enterprise to express business measures along axes of analysis, which are named dimensions. Business Performance Indicators allow business users to fully articulate the requirements for analysis, or reporting.
Business Performance Indicators provide the answer to a particular business issue or goal that is identified at top-management level as a business opportunity, based on the analysis of business facts. By combining measures and dimensions, the Business Performance Indicators define a specific business opportunity context, and the associated links to terms in the Business Core Vocabulary in order to determine which parts of the vocabulary are needed to fulfill a specific analysis or reporting requirement.
For more details, see Business Performance Indicators.
Business Scopes
A Business Scope is used to identify a subset of the Business Core Vocabulary that supports a particular business issue, standard or regulation, project area or business function. Business Scopes are expressed as categories that each include a number of term references. Business Scopes contain only referenced Terms in the Business Core Vocabulary and Business Performance Indicators categories. Business Scopes never own any Business Terms.
Users can create their own Business Scopes to support their project requirements. For example, several Business Scopes can be created in the course of a project, each capturing data items added in a particular phase of the project. Business Scopes can also be used to capture the required content of a report or the total coverage of a source system model as mapped into the Business Core Vocabulary.
Within the Business Scopes, there is a subcategory of Alignment Scopes which are a grouping of business terms that may be relevant to align the Business Core Vocabulary and Business Performance Indicators for a specific Industry Alignment Vocabulary topic.
The Knowledge Accelerators also include Business Scopes available for separate import and represent subsets of the full Knowledge Accelerator content.
For more details, see Business Scopes.
Industry Alignment Vocabularies
Most organizations have a range of external standards and regulations with which they are obliged to align or comply. The Industry Alignment Vocabularies describe the data requirements of the standard or regulation, incorporating terminology that originates from an internal or external source, and support data structures. The types of data structures typically supported include regulatory reports, industry standards, business architecture standards, vendor interfaces and legacy source systems.
In addition to structures and terms reflecting the source regulation or standard, the Industry Alignment Vocabularies also have mappings to the relevant terms in the Business Core Vocabulary so that an organization can quickly determine the impact or coverage of that regulation or standard on data structures and the enterprise terminology.
For more details, see Industry Alignment Vocabularies.
Synonyms
Within an organization, different words or phrases can refer to the same common topics. These alternative words and phrases may derive from different systems, applications, and country specific terminology. The words and phrases are frequently used and familiar to the business and therefore must be supported in the enterprise business vocabulary.
The Knowledge Accelerators synonyms extend the vocabulary with variations of common industry specific terminology. Alternative versions of words and phrases are recorded and related to terms in the Business Core Vocabulary. This converges terminology used across the business onto one common vocabulary.
For more details, see Synonyms.
Reference data
Reference data quality and consistency are key within an organization. The Knowledge Accelerators includes industry-specific reference data that is mapped to the core business vocabulary. The reference data sets can also be extended or customized with values from existing data sources. IBM Knowledge Catalog can use this reference data along with Data Classes to profile the data.
For more details, see Reference data.
Data classes
Data classes describe the type and characteristics of data contained in data assets. They are used during IBM Knowledge Catalog data enrichment to profile data. The Knowledge Accelerators include industry-specific data classes that leverage the codes from reference data, lists of values and regular expressions to identify data patterns, or column name matching criteria. These data classes enhance the ability of the IBM Knowledge Catalog enrichment process to recognize industry specific data. The data classes are also mapped to the Business Core Vocabulary to allow metadata enrichment automatically assign these discovered data assets to their respective business terms. The data classes can be customized to refer to different reference data, lists of values, regular expressions or extended column matching criteria.
For more details, see Data classes.
Policies and rules
The Knowledge Accelerators provide a sample set of policies and governance rules in the area of data privacy. The sample policies and rules describe the activities that are related to the processing of personal information.
Governance rules can be related to one or more policies and can also be related to business terms. The sample policies and governance rules that are provided illustrate how you can define your own set of rules.
For more details, see Policies and rules.
Classifications
Business Core Vocabulary terms and data classes are classified as Personal Information (PI) or Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) based on the nature of data they describe. The use of classifications assists business and technical users when searching and navigating the vocabulary for personal data.
For more details, see Classifications and tags.
For more information about Knowledge Accelerators, see https://www.ibm.com/cloud/knowledge-accelerators.
The following topics have more detail for each industry.