Discovering relationships in your master data

Automatically create and manage relationships between records and entities in IBM Master Data Management by defining discovery rules that evaluate your data and establish relationships.

Use relationship discovery to establish dynamic connections between data objects without manual intervention, ensuring that your data relationships are consistently maintained as your data evolves. When you run the relationship discovery job, it evaluates your rules and automatically creates relationships between matching data objects based on the expressions and conditions that you configured.

Relationships that were created by using discovery rules are labeled with a Discovered tag.

If there is an existing, manually created relationship between the target and source endpoints with the same relationship type, relationship discovery rules will not override it and will not create a duplicate.

When the relationship discovery job creates relationships, it saves them in the database with the rule_id of the rule that created the relationship. This metadata can help you to track how each relationship was formed.

Tip: By using the IBM Master Data Management API, you can perform exclusive bulk export and bulk delete operations for relationships created by using relationship discovery rules.

  • To export only auto-created relationships, pass export_only_auto_created=true as a query parameter in the export job.
  • To delete only auto-created relationships, pass delete_only_auto_created=true as a query parameter in the bulk delete job.
Required permissions
To manage relationship discovery, you must be a member of the DataEngineer user group for the IBM Master Data Management service.

Before you begin

Before you create relationship discovery rules, ensure that you complete the following tasks:

  • Define relationship types in your data model.
  • Define the source and target record types or entity types for each relationship.
  • Identify the properties that you will use for identifying relationships.
  • Configure your entity types to persist if you plan to use relationship discovery rules on entities. For information about entity persistence, see Data concepts in IBM Master Data Management.

Creating a relationship discovery rule

You can use relationship discovery rules to create the following types of relationship links:

  • Record-to-record: Link records of different types (for example, person-to-organization).
  • Record-to-entity: Link records to entities.
  • Entity-to-entity: Link entities to other entities.

Tip: Use identifier attributes in your relationship discovery conditions. Identifiers have consistent data structure and quality, which prevents incorrect relationships. Although discovery rules support attributes with strings or numbers, results can be inconsistent if the attribute values are low quality or have mismatched structures.

To create a relationship discovery rule:

  1. From the Master data navigation menu, click the Data types icon data types icon.

  2. Click Relationship types.

  3. Select the relationship type for which you want to create rules.

  4. Open the Discovery tab and click New discovery rule. Define the rule properties:

    1. Provide a unique, descriptive name for the rule.
    2. Optional: Add a description for the rule.
    3. Select the source and target data types for the discovery rule. You can only choose data types that are configured as valid endpoints for this relationship type. Refer to the endpoint rules in the Relationship type side panel.
    4. Click Next.

  5. Configure how IBM Master Data Management discovers relationships by defining one or more conditions. When these conditions are met, the system creates a relationship.

    1. Select a source endpoint attribute and a corresponding target endpoint attribute.
    2. Select a comparison operator (equals or does not equal). You must define at least one condition that uses an equals comparison.
    3. Optional: Click Add condition to define additional rule conditions.

    Important: You must define at least one condition for the rule to be able to discover relationships.

  6. Optional: Define value-based filters that determine whether to apply the rule based on the value of certain attributes on the source or target endpoints.

    1. Select the endpoint (source or target) that this filter applies to.
    2. Define the filter condition by selecting an attribute and a corresponding value.
    3. Optional: Click Add filter to define additional filters.

  7. Click Next.

  8. Review the rule details to ensure that everything is correct, then click Create rule.

When you create a rule, it automatically becomes active. Run the relationship discovery job to identify and create relationships based on the conditions that you defined. When you add new data assets, run the relationship discovery job again.

Running relationship discovery

To run your discovery rules on your master data and create relationships, go to the Discovery tab. If there are active rules that have not yet been run, a banner prompts you to run the discovery job.

Important: After you run relationship discovery, any rule that resulted in a relationship being created becomes non-editable.

To run relationship discovery:

  1. From the Master data navigation menu, click the Data types icon data types icon.
  2. Click Relationship types.
  3. Select the relationship type for which you want to run discovery rules.
  4. Open the Discovery tab.
  5. In the discovery rules table, select all the rules that you want to include in the relationship discovery process.
  6. Ensure that the rules that you want to run are active.
  7. Click Create relationships in the banner to trigger the relationship discovery job.

Activating and deactivating rules

When you create a rule, it automatically becomes active. You can deactivate a rule at any time. However, if you deactivate one or more rules, you must rerun the relationship discovery job to delete the relationships that the rule previously created.

You can activate and deactivate rules, but you cannot delete them.

To activate or deactivate a rule:

  1. From the Master data navigation menu, click the Data types icon data types icon.
  2. Click Relationship types.
  3. Select the relationship type for which you want to manage rules.
  4. Open the Discovery tab.
  5. From the list of rules, find the one that you want to change the status of. Hover over its row in the discovery rules table, then select Activate or Deactivate.
  6. Optional: Rerun the discovery job by clicking Create relationships in the banner.

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