Business modeling and governance overview

DeltaVault’s business modeling and governance features live under Business in the left navigation, which expands into four items: Models, Entities, Glossary, and Map & Match. Opening a model from the Models grid takes you to its detail page, which carries five 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

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 a read view of those attributes and their definitions.
• 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

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

Item	What it is	What it does
Models	The models grid	Groups your models by domain, with submodels nested underneath; click through to a model’s detail page
Entities	The organization-wide entity catalog tree	Browse and search every entity across every domain and model; click through to view or edit one
Glossary	A read view of all attributes, organization-wide	Lets the team consult definitions, classifications, and mapped-column counts
Map & Match	The mapping workbench, organization-wide	Links source tables and columns to entities and attributes in bulk

Opening a model from the grid lands on its detail page, which carries five tabs of its own: Details (the model’s editor and its membership), Canvas (create and arrange entities, attributes, and relationships), Entities, Glossary, and Map & Match. The last three mirror the organization-wide items above, scoped to that model’s direct member entities: the model’s Glossary tab drops the scope picker entirely, and its 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 detail tabs and Map & Match (its own tab, or the organization-wide workbench) are where you do work; the Glossary is where you read the result as a vocabulary, and each entity and attribute carries its own governance status on its sheet. 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

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, 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 on its own sheet, and the AI pipelines that close those gaps launch from the matcher and the Ask AI pane.

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.

Related guides

• Business glossary and governance quick start: the end-to-end walkthrough
• Business entities: creating entities and attributes
• Map and match source metadata: the bulk workbench, plus the Sources-tab and source-side ways to bind
• Business glossary: the vocabulary read view
• Data governance overview: classifications, ownership, and definitions in depth