Specs

The Specs feature allows you to define the metadata needed to support dynamic, or soft, attributes in physical InfoSphere® MDM.

Dynamic attributes are ones that are not hardcoded into the object or data model. Specs are used in the Party demographics feature, as well as in the product domain, to provide easy support for highly dynamic and flexible custom data models.

Specs are a type of metadata used to define extensions to class entities within the physical InfoSphere MDM data model. It is important to note that the term specs in this context is not a shortened version of the word specifications. Specs define the hierarchical structure of dynamic attributes and their types, and they provide other related metadata through the use of XSD technology. The variable data is stored as XML columns in the database.

Specs and the related metadata, Specs Formats and Specs Format Translations, are defined through the Workbench and then deployed to an InfoSphere MDM instance. Specs are managed through a set of spec-related administrative services.