About Egeria

Egeria is the world’s first open source metadata standard grown from the needs of IBM, SAS, Cloudera, ING Bank and few other big data governance companies.

Egeria is a graph database based on JanusGraph, open source distributed graph database.

You can think of Egeria as a set of cohorts or distributed database systems sharing the same communication standards that hold just any metadata information the world needs.

If one of the cohorts doesn’t have the information you need it can query other cohorts and get the information remotely if such information is stored.

This is called the federation idea among the cohorts.

Internal Egeria manipulation

The type system in Egeria is dynamic. Egeria is a NoSQL database and doesn’t have database schemas predefined.

It works with graph organized but otherwise unstructured data in the classical sense of relational databases.

You use type explorer to navigate the entities and relationships inside the Egeria database. Navigation is coupled with D3 visualizer (JavaScript based).

There is a finite list of servers you can connect to:

  • cocoMDS1
  • cocoMDS2
  • cocoMDS3
  • …

There are two basic views:

  • Entity Inheritance view
  • Neighborhood view

Inheritance view root type is OpenMetadataRoot below that are:

  • Annotation
  • AnnotationReview
  • DataField
  • InformalTag
  • Like
  • Rating
  • Referenceable
  • SearchKeyword

Referenceable means this is an element that has a unique name. For instance any Asset entity type is under Referenceable entity type previewed from the Inheritance view.

The idea is: It should be easier to understand and navigate the entity type system in Egeria than using the ER UML diagrams.

Entity type has:

  • Type status
  • Attributes
  • Relationships
  • …

Typical entity type attributes are:

  • Description
  • Latest change
  • Name
  • Owner
  • OwnerType
  • AdditionalProperties …

Relationship type has:

  • Type status
  • Attributes
  • Entities …

What you store in Egeria

Egeria provides open APIs, event formats, types and integration logic so organizations can share data management and governance metadata.

The universal across the entire enterprise without reformatting or restricting the data to a single format, platform, or vendor product.

Type of information is inside Egeria:

  • Governance
  • Glossary
  • Collaboration
  • Lineage
  • Data Assets
  • Models and Reference Data
  • Metadata Discovery
  • Base types
  • Derived types …

Types of APIs in Egeria

These are called OMAS or Open Metadata Access Services sorted alphabetically:

  • Asset Catalog
  • Asset Consumer
  • Asset Lineage
  • Asset Owner
  • Community Profile
  • Connected Asset
  • Data Infrastructure
  • Data Platform
  • Data Privacy
  • Data Process
  • Data Protection
  • Data Science
  • DevOps
  • Digital Architecture
  • Discovery Engine
  • Governance Engine
  • Governance Program
  • Information View
  • Project Management
  • Software Developer
  • Stewardship Action
  • Subject Area