GraphConnect

Business requirements such as the relatively new General Data Protection Regulation in Europe are driving a need to better understand customer data assets and where they reside within the organization. Businesses are collecting mountains of information about their customers that, when organized effectively, offers the potential to reduce regulatory and compliance risk.

Many organizations store information in data warehouses, or more recently, data lakes. However, with customer databases collecting hefty streams of data on a daily basis, wading through and determining what information is useful or relevant for initiatives such as GDPR can become a very daunting task.

A key aspect of delivering Single View solutions involves understanding relevant data assets and their quality and suitability for purpose: bridging the gap between the business and IT sides of the organizations requires a focus on enterprise metadata, with the ability to collaborate on whiteboard style models, maps of existing data assets to these models, and an ability to profile directly against these models to evaluate their relevance. Graph provides a natural way to model these requirements, and to understand the Enterprise Metadata Graph and its typically complex set of relationships.

This presentation will show how the answer is to adopt a new approach and develop a Single View and Enterprise Metadata Management strategy around Graph databases, with an eye towards key business drivers like GDPR, to deliver a model that is far quicker to implement and more agile than anything that has gone before.

As the world leader for the travel industry, Amadeus is using highly distributed systems to serve over 2 billion transactions a day. This leads to a large application ecosystem, which can grow rapidly in complexity through emerging technologies and acquisitions.

In order to understand the inter-dependency of these systems we needed to build a cartography of Business Services, Applications, Technologies and Integration points. We will demo our solution to this problem built using Neo4j, YAC (Your Architecture Cartography), designed to take on the beast of the architecture landscape. Furthermore the power of graph and Neo4j has allowed us to quickly expand to new use cases, we are excited to demo the latest of these on technology migration and data compliance for GDPR.

Many enterprises have data assets stored in RDBMS and offline documents such as MS Excel. Graph database can create complex data relationships across these heterogeneous data sources for sales reps, clients, vendors, and product domains, etc. Clearly, “integration” among these systems is challenging but critical to the sustainability and success of enterprise analytics. Moreover, the collaborative whiteboard-friendly style of Graph modeling engages business stakeholders better than the arcane nature of RDBMS, etc. And complex, real-world queries are much efficient and easier to state than with traditional databases. Graph technology definitely has appeal to large enterprises’ in orchestrating and evolving data integration solutions to data management challenges.

This session will discuss major aspects of such an endeavor by sharing lessons learned regarding topics such as:

• Understanding the key use cases for Graph in the real-world of large business enterprises (“why”)

• Determining the “Business Value” of an Enterprise Graph Database program (“what”)

• Planning the roadmap on getting started via POC for technical discovery & impact analysis (“how”)

Metadata does not have to be boring. University of Washington's Knowledge Navigator is more than a metadata repository, and it's more than a set of business glossaries. Instead, Knowledge Navigator is an interactive platform that allows users to traverse the business and technical metadata layers to make sense of the data they are working with.

Knowledge Navigator's interactive platform lets users search, trust, and make use of the data information landscape. We want the user to feel comfortable clicking through the interface, asking and answering questions along the way. This whole user experience is about exploration and meaning. Find out how a small team used Neo4J to create a tool that provides self-service access to conceptual and technical descriptions, definitions, lineage, interactive relationship maps, impact analysis information, and keeps users informed and engaged throughout enterprise system migrations.