Using IBM Industry Models

These topics explain how to use the IBM Industry Models.

Flow of the IBM Industry Model development tasks — Figure 1. Flow of IBM Industry Model development tasks

Business terms
Defining industry concepts in plain business language, business terms have properties and can be related to each other. Business terms are organized by business categories and by hierarchies. Clearly defined business terms help standardization and communication within a company. Mapping to the data models enables users to create a common, enterprise-wide picture of the data requirements, and to transform these requirements into IT data structures.
Supportive content
Supportive content includes terms that incorporate terminology that originates from an internal or external source, and supports data structures.
Analytical requirements
Analytical requirements comprise high-level business information that is used by the enterprise to express business measures along axes of analysis, which are named dimensions. Analytical requirements allow business users to fully articulate the requirements for analysis using their own business terminology, and are the basis for building the enterprise data models that are used to develop the IT assets that deliver the analytical requirements to business users.
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, and of which the business wants 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 that support the analytical requirements. DWM can be accessed by directly using analytical tools or queries, or its content can be easily distributed to specific downstream data marts. DWM content is derived from Business Data Model (BDM) and Atomic Warehouse Model (AWM). DWM also contains representations to analytical requirements called Business Solution Templates (BSTs). These are logical only star schema representations of reporting and analytical requirements. DWM is delivered and customized as a logical data model.
Deploying to physical data models
These topics explain how to deploy to physical data models.