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 Watson 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 Watson Knowledge Catalog Enterprise plan. For more information on the Enterprise plan, see Watson Knowledge Catalog offering plans.
Watch this overview video introducing the Knowledge Accelerators.
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 Watson 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.
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.
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.
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. Watson Knowledge Catalog can use this reference data along with Data Classes to profile the data.
Classifications
Each of the categories and terms in the Knowledge Accelerators are classified and tagged. The use of classifications and tags assists business and technical users when searching and navigating the vocabulary.
For more information about Knowledge Accelerators, see https://www.ibm.com/cloud/knowledge-accelerators.
The following topics have more detail for each industry.