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Business modeling and governance overview

DeltaVault’s business modeling and governance features live under Business in the left navigation, which expands into three items: Models, Glossary, and Map & Match. Opening a model from the Models grid takes you to its detail page, which carries four tabs of its own. This overview explains how the Business items and the model detail tabs relate so the steps in the quick start make sense as a connected loop rather than a checklist.

One spine: entities and attributes

Section titled “One spine: entities and attributes”

A business entity is a concept your business cares about (Customer, Order, Shipment). Its attributes are the facts about that concept (Customer ID, email address, order total). Together, entities and attributes are the single source of truth for what your data means, independent of which table happens to store it.

Everything else is a layer on top of that spine:

  • Governance attaches classifications, ownership, definitions, and the approval lifecycle to entities and attributes.
  • The glossary is where you browse those entities and attributes as terms, and where their definitions get written and approved.
  • Map & Match connects real source tables and columns to entities and attributes, so the spine’s meaning reaches the catalog.

Because all three read from the same entities and attributes, you declare each fact once. Classify the Customer ID attribute as personal data a single time, and every source column mapped to it shows that classification automatically.

The Business group

Section titled “The Business group”

Business is a group in the left navigation that expands into three items:

ItemWhat it isWhat it does
ModelsThe models gridGroups your models by domain, with submodels nested underneath; click through to a model’s detail page
GlossaryThe organization-wide vocabulary, as a tree of termsBrowse and search every entity and attribute across every domain and model; read and edit definitions, classifications, and mapped-column counts, and open any term to view or edit it
Map & MatchThe mapping workbench, organization-wideLinks source tables and columns to entities and attributes in bulk

Opening a model from the grid lands on its detail page, which carries four tabs of its own: Details (the model’s editor and its membership), Canvas (create and arrange entities, attributes, and relationships), Entities, and Map & Match. The last two mirror the organization-wide items above, scoped to that model’s direct member entities: the Map & Match tab keeps the source scope picker but proposes only the model’s members, badging each mapped row In this model or Outside this model. The model has no Glossary tab of its own. In its place the page offers an Open in Glossary action, which opens the Glossary with that model already selected in the tree.

The model detail tabs and Map & Match (its own tab, or the organization-wide workbench) are where you build the model and bind it to sources; the Glossary is where the same entities and attributes read as a vocabulary, and where their definitions get written and approved. Each entity and attribute carries its own governance status in its panel. You can also map contextually without opening the workbench: from the Sources section of an entity’s Details tab, or from the catalog’s source-side actions (covered below).

How meaning flows

Section titled “How meaning flows”

These stages sit in a dependency order, because each one needs the output of the one before it:

Source metadata          Business model           Governance              Read & monitor
(tables, columns)   →     (entities,         →     (classifications,  →    (Glossary +
                          attributes)              owners, definitions,    entity status)
                                                   approval)
        └──────── Map & Match (and contextual binds) link the first two ────────┘

Read left to right: you import source metadata, model entities and attributes, link the two, govern the entities and attributes, and read the result in the Glossary, where you can also write and approve the definitions themselves, with governance status shown on each entity and attribute. The linking step runs three ways for the same write: the Map & Match workbench in bulk, the Sources section of an entity’s Details tab one source at a time, or the catalog’s source-side actions (“Map to entity” on a table, “Map to attribute” on a column). All three write the same mapping, and a bind made on any one reflects on the others.

Two consequences fall out of this flow:

  • Governance never lives on tables or columns directly. Source metadata only ever shows derived, read-only badges; the authoritative value lives on the mapped entity or attribute. To change a classification, edit the model, not the catalog.
  • Completion is computed from the model. Define, Govern, and Map progress is derived straight from your entities, attributes, and mappings, so each entity and attribute shows what is still incomplete in its own panel, and the AI pipelines that close those gaps launch from the matcher and the Ask AI pane.

The how

Section titled “The how”

This page is the why. For the ordered, end-to-end procedure (import, model, map, adopt, classify, approve, monitor), follow the Business glossary and governance quick start.

Section titled “Related guides”