Today IBM® announces IBM Knowledge Accelerators, a new content offering delivering an enriched glossary for IBM Watson® Knowledge Catalog on IBM Cloud Pak® for Data. Knowledge Accelerators provides the knowledge base for governance and continued value growth by connecting regulatory content and industry KPIs to your business context within the business vocabulary.

IBM has a long history of providing best practice Industry content for our clients via our Industry Models offerings. With Knowledge Accelerators, IBM solidifies its leadership in best practice governance by bringing deep industry content out of the box to Watson Knowledge Catalog. Today’s release includes three core offerings:

• IBM Knowledge Accelerator for Healthcare
• IBM Knowledge Accelerator for Energy and Utilities
• IBM Knowledge Accelerator for Insurance

This article answers some key questions about the Knowledge Accelerators and the value they can bring to your organization’s DataOps program.

What distinguishes Knowledge Accelerators from the IBM Industry Models?

First, Knowledge Accelerator terms are actionable. Like their predecessor IBM Industry Models, Knowledge Accelerators include comprehensive industry terms for an enterprise business vocabulary, key concept terms from industry standards and regulations, and predefined industry KPIs. While Industry Models had business knowledge distributed across several logical data models and business glossaries, the Knowledge Accelerators consolidate all business knowledge – definitions as well as technical metadata – into a glossary within Watson Knowledge Catalog, providing users with enriched context for each term. This makes them actionable for driving DataOps automation in the future.

Second, Knowledge Accelerators are truly best practice glossaries for governance. By designing a glossary metamodel around the Watson Knowledge Catalog governance elements, IBM leads the way to help clients create and make the best use of glossaries within their governance programs.

And finally, Knowledge Accelerators are native to Watson Knowledge Catalog and will serve as the basis for future services that take action on business terms within Watson Knowledge Catalog. As a teaser, one of the first services based on the Knowledge Accelerators IBM plans to introduce in 2021 is the ability to generate scoped logical data models directly from within Watson Knowledge Catalog.

How do Knowledge Accelerators benefit clients considering Watson Knowledge Catalog on Cloud Pak for Data?

Watson Knowledge Catalog is the perfect governance and catalog solution because it includes data quality, data lineage and data protection features built into the workflow. These benefits and capabilities are included in one catalog tool to simplify the cataloging and access of enterprise information assets.

Even with the proliferation of sophisticated solutions, when it comes to establishing a business vocabulary as the central knowledge base for governance and AI-driven processes, clients still struggle with where to begin. Here is where Knowledge Accelerators can help.

With Knowledge Accelerators, clients receive a comprehensive industry-specific business glossary out of the box, with business glossary terms grouped into business-relevant subcategories. This feature not only accelerates the creation of a best practice enterprise vocabulary, but also demonstrates how best to align industry standards and regulations with your organization’s business context using relationships between regulatory concept terms and the business vocabulary.

Knowledge Accelerators also speed time to value for clients using Watson Knowledge Catalog, dramatically reducing the cost of realizing a governance program and delivering true “everything to everyone” self-service access to enterprise information and insights.

Data discovery is a key feature within Watson Knowledge Catalog, enabling automation of classification of source data. Knowledge Accelerators support data discovery by ensuring all terms are pre-assigned to the proper data classes provided with Watson Knowledge Catalog. Also, Knowledge Accelerators provide hundreds of reference data sets that can be used to extend the scope of the data discovery process. And users can create new data classes using the reference data sets within Knowledge Accelerators.

The Importance of a metamodel

The Knowledge Accelerator metamodel serves as a cookbook for making the most of the rich features for term definitions provided by the Watson Knowledge Catalog. Features like custom attributes, custom relationships, classifications and tagging are used to encapsulate technical context within the term metadata.

The metamodel provides consistency across IBM’s Knowledge Accelerator offerings, and allows IBM to build glossary-driven DataOps integration and automation services that accelerate and simplify our clients’ DataOps activity.

Additionally, having a metamodel establishes Bring Your Own Glossary (BYOG), allowing clients and Business Partners to make the best use of Watson Knowledge Catalog and any current or future DataOps services designed for Knowledge Accelerators.

Get started with Knowledge Accelerators

IBM provides a new standard for best practice governance available for Healthcare, Energy and Utilities, and Insurance organizations.

To learn more about IBM Knowledge Accelerators, visit www.ibm.com/cloud/knowledge-accelerators

Read the eBook to understand how a modern data catalog can benefit from an enriched glossary to improve data classification, regulatory compliance, self-service analytics, and other governance operations.

Related reading: Building and future-proofing an extensible business vocabulary with IBM Knowledge Accelerators