Architecture

Dataphin provides conceptual modeling to help you build business models directly in the platform, translating business insights into the data mid-end and integrating modeling with data warehouse planning. This helps data consumers better understand data and its business context. The following sections describe the fundamental concepts of Dataphin conceptual models, including subject areas and entity relationship diagrams.

Background information

Building a data mid-end typically starts with comprehensive business analysis: cataloging the personnel, events, and basic rules involved, and clarifying the interactions and behaviors among individuals, events, and objects. Once you understand the business architecture and operations, you can develop a conceptual model that abstracts and graphically represents the real-world business scenario.

Feature overview

• Multi-level subject areas: Dataphin supports the creation and tree diagram visualization of multi-level subject areas.

• Entity relationship definition: When defining business entities, you can simultaneously establish entity relationships. Dataphin supports various relationship types, such as association, inheritance, hierarchy, sequence, flow, and inclusion, to precisely depict business interconnections.

• Entity relationship diagram: You can visually configure object relationships and definitions based on real business scenarios to construct a conceptual model, which is presented as an entity relationship flowchart.

• Logical table construction: You can rapidly create logical tables that correspond to business entities, bridging the gap between conceptual and logical model construction.

Retail industry conceptual model example

Subject area model

Before conceptual modeling, you must establish the relevant subject areas. The following is a subject area model for the retail industry, built using Dataphin:

In the retail sector, the three foundational entities are people, goods, and places. From these, three core business object entities emerge: customers (consumers), products, and channels (offline outlets or various online platforms). Surrounding these are numerous business entities that form the industry's complex structure.

• The central business activity in retail is typically sales, which involves selling products to consumers through various channels. The sales activity entity is linked with the three business object entities: customers, products, and channels.

• The marketing domain addresses traffic generation and customer (consumer) base expansion through entities such as marketing campaigns and consumption vouchers. The content domain provides resources to enhance customer (consumer) loyalty, featuring a variety of content-related entities.

• Entities within the supply chain domain ensure product availability, encompassing suppliers, procurement, transportation, and warehousing.

• Entities in the fulfillment domain are responsible for delivering products to customers.

Conceptual model

Building upon the subject area model, you construct the conceptual model by defining the entities within each subject area and their interrelations.