Data models

Data models are enterprise-wide business and design data models used to build and accelerate the development of reporting solutions, such as business intelligence (BI) and standardized reporting. They are mapped back to the vocabulary and act as a bridge between the business terminology and the deployed IT assets. The data models are delivered and customized as logical data models by using entity-relationship (ER) representation.

The data models are delivered in the following formats. See the Data Models folder in your IIW installation directory.

InfoSphere Data Architect (IDA): an IDA project containing logical data models that can be viewed and customized in IDA.
ERwin: logical data models that can be viewed and customized in ERwin.
HTML: a HTML rendering of the IDA logical data models that can be viewed via a web browser.
Note: HTML versions of the logical data models may be generated using the IDA Model Publishing utility.

Figure 1. Data model components and their relationships

Scoping

A scope is used to identify a subset of data model elements of a particular project or a particular business area. Such scopes are defined by using diagrams within the <<Scopes>> package¹ in the data models. During the customization of a particular data model, you define your own project scopes. No predefined scopes are included in the delivered data models.

Ownership

The data model components are owned by the IT department.

Data model core concepts
The key data concepts of the IBM Insurance Information Warehouse can be used to describe the needs of insurance organizations. Below describes the business concepts and how they might apply to examples for Property & Casualty and Life Insurance organizations.
Business Data Model
The Business Data Model (BDM) is a conceptual data model that specifies the third-normal-form data structures that are required to represent the concepts that are defined in the business terms. BDM does not contain technical information, such as primary keys, foreign keys, technical attributes for history support. BDM provides an enterprise-wide, generic, and flexible data representation for the design of operational or informational systems, serving as an overall reference point for business and IT.
Atomic Warehouse Model
The Atomic Warehouse Model (AWM) is a design-level data model that represents the enterprise-wide repository of atomic data used for information processing. This includes the historic changes to business information over time, that the business may want to track for analytical purposes. In addition to the business content, AWM includes technical constructs, such as primary and foreign keys, history entities and data warehouse population information. AWM is highly normalized, although it can contain duplication and derivation for ease of navigation and performance.
Dimensional Warehouse Model
The Dimensional Warehouse Model (DWM) is the enterprise-wide repository for analytical data. It contains star-schema-style dimensional data structures that are organized around fact entities. DWM is delivered and customized as a logical data model that represents in a denormalized way the enterprise's business terms and analytical requirements defined in the Vocabulary. DWM content is also derived from Business Data Model (BDM) and Atomic Warehouse Model (AWM). It also includes entities for efficiency of storage and analysis, such as mini-dimension entities and bridge entities. When deployed, DWM can be accessed by directly using analytical tools or queries, or its content can be easily distributed to specific downstream data marts.

Parent topic: Components

¹ If the <<Scopes>> package does not exist, you must create it as indicated in the data models customization tasks.