DEMS allows you to manage and govern your data itself as well as several forms of intelligence that surround that data. This includes what DEMS calls the business context, a glossary of relevant business terms and descriptions. Other types of governed intelligence include domains of excellence, complete with key value indicators, and business requirements. For the latter, in particular, the product will automatically generate queries and scripts that test against your requirements from their natural language descriptions: in other words, their semantics. This is a valuable capability, and a good example of how DEMS leverages linguistics in support of governance.
Fig 01 - GDPR Excellence cockpit in DEMS
The results of these queries, as well as a host of other information, is consolidated and presented within your ‘cockpit’. This is, in effect, a series of personalised, dynamically created dashboards that can be drilled into and that each display all information related to a particular topic that is relevant to you in specific. For instance, your data stewardship cockpit might display information pertaining to any domains that you are responsible for. A range of cockpits are available, and one of these, the ‘GDPR Excellence’ cockpit (used for monitoring GDPR compliance) is shown in Figure 1. There is also a high-level cockpit that provides an overview of governance within your enterprise. Combined with the built-in mobile view, GDE boasts that this offers you the ability to “govern your entire enterprise from your iPad”.
Fig 02 - Semantic graph in DEMS
All of the intelligence and data governed by DEMS is accessible to view and edit either through natural language search or via automatically generated hyperlinks found within related data and intelligence assets. In turn, asset relationships are defined by semantic mappings that are also generated automatically. What’s more, these relationships can be visualised in a navigable, dynamically generated semantic graph, which comes complete with full lineage and traceability information. This graph, shown in Figure 2, can be viewed at an enterprise level or centred on an individual asset.
It’s also worth noting that DEMS is a highly automated solution, over and above the automation we have already described. In addition to the aforementioned requirements scripts, hyperlinks and semantic mappings, the platform will automatically generate stewardship information (for instance, an appropriate list of stewards) for each data asset, automatically generate business terms and semantic models from your system using AI, automatically check (and thereby enforce) your data quality rules, automatically create communities for groups of associated users, and automatically manage roles for said users. Moreover, governance (for example, change requests) can be automated via the use of workflows. Perhaps most impressively, the platform offers a full set of compliance requirements and semantics for GDPR out of the box. In principle, all you need to do is check your assets against those requirements – this is, of course, automated – to see precisely what you need to do to become GDPR compliant.
Finally, all the knowledge contained in DEMS can be consolidated and exported in multiple formats, such as PDF, XML, JSON, and so on. At your option, this can include your underlying semantic information as well, which may be useful when exporting into other systems.
