What is an asset?

An asset is either a digital or physical object/property that provides value to the organization that owns it. Examples of an asset include:

• Data sources such as databases, files and data feeds.
• IT infrastructure and applications that automate many aspects of an organization’s operation.
• Digital services and APIs that provide access to the services offered by the organization.
• Analytical models and processes that differentiate an organization from its competitors or ensure it is operating legally and ethically.
• Buildings and other locations.
• Physical objects that have a unique identity (eg a serial number).

Much governance is centered around an organization’s assets since they represent tangible value. This involves maintaining information about each asset and managing events related to the asset in order to keep it protected and to get the maximum value from it.

Egeria is particularly focused on providing the ability to maintain the information necessary for managing digital assets and the infrastructure that supports them. Although it has a flexible model to allow the definition of asset to be expanded to include a broader range of physical assets.

The information about an asset that is used to describe its characteristics and how it should be managed (that is, the Asset’s metadata) it stored in a sub-graph of open metadata instances (entities and relationships) with the Asset entity (type definition) at the root. The Asset entity contains a small amount of information that merely captures the existence of the real asset. Then other entities are linked to it to add more information. It is likely that this additional information is identified, captured and stored by different tools. The open metadata services gather this information together and distribute it to provide the most complete view of the asset’s properties.

More information on the types of attachments that can be added to an asset can be found here.

Accessing Asset Content

Egeria provides an open framework for accessing the content of digital assets and the information about them. It is called the Open Connector Framework (OCF) and it provides specialized connectors (clients) for accessing specific types of Asset and the information about them.

The type of connector to use is specified in the Connection entity that is linked to the Asset.

APIs and Events for managing Asset information (metadata)

Egeria’s Open Metadata Access Services (OMASs) provide the specialized services for managing Assets. Each OMAS focuses on a particular part of the asset lifecycle or person/tool that is working with the Assets. For example,

• Asset Catalog OMAS provides a search service for locating Assets.
• Asset Consumer OMAS provides a service for accessing the content of an Asset, extracting additional information that is known about the Asset and providing feedback about the Asset.
• Asset Owner OMAS provides a service for the owner of an Asset to classify and manage the asset, and understand how it is being used by the organization.
• Discovery Engine OMAS provides a service for adding annotations to an asset’s information that has been determined by specific analysis of the Asset’s contents by a discovery service.
• Data Platform OMAS enables a data platform (such as a database or file system) to maintain information about the assets stored on the platform.
• IT Infrastructure OMAS provides a service for maintaining information about the IT infrastructure owned or used by an organization.
• Data Science OMAS provides a service for maintaining information about analytical models and related assets such as python notebooks.
• Information View OMAS enables business intelligence and data virtualization tools to maintain information about the data views and reporting Assets they are maintaining.

Information about Assets that is managed by Egeria

Egeria’s Open Metadata Repository Services (OMRS) provides the ability to store and extract information about Assets in a distributed collections of servers called an open metadata repository cohort.

The types of information that can be stores are defined in the open metadata types.

In the open metadata types, there is a common abstract type called Asset that appears in the base model.

Inheriting from asset is a hierarchy of increasingly specialized definitions for different types of Assets. Each definition adds more properties about the Asset. Figure 1 shows some of the key assets.

Figure 1: Asset hierarchy

• Infrastructure covers physical assets from machinery, sensors and networks. There is a subclass called ITInfrastructure that is where IT hosts and services ar located.

• Process describes processing from simple software components to multi-task workflows.

• DataStore a physical store of data such as a file.

• DataSet describes a logical collection of data. These are created from a combination of processes and physical data stores. They tend to be the collections of data that are of interest to the organization.

• API the means to access digital capability consisting of infrastructure, processes, data stores and data sets.

Area 2 is where the asset definitions are built out.

In addition, model 0205 shows how an Asset is associated with a Connection object. The connection object provides the properties necessary to create a connectors to access the asset’s contents as described in section Accessing Assets above.

License: CC BY 4.0, Copyright Contributors to the ODPi Egeria project.