Blueprints

A blueprint is the collection of elements that define the overall landscape of the information project and of associated standard practices.

A blueprint has components that visually organize your information project. A domain is a group of blueprint elements that share a common function. A diagram is the graphical part of a blueprint that shows blueprint elements such as databases, warehouses, files, and data rules. A diagram can contain subdiagrams, which show groups of blueprint elements that are in a diagram.

The following figure shows a blueprint that is called Integrated_Warehouse. The blueprint is in a project folder called MiscellaneousProject. The Integrated_Warehouse blueprint is the root diagram for five domains: Analytics, Consumers, Data Integration, Data Repositories, and Data Sources. In this example, the Data Integration domain contains the Integrate Sources and Monitor Data Quality blueprints elements, which share common integration functionality. The Data Integration domain is shown in the root diagram.

Figure 1. Blueprint Navigator pane with project, domains, blueprint elements, diagrams, and subdiagrams

In this example, the Subdiagram icon indicates that the Integrate Sources blueprint element also has blueprint elements in a subdiagram. The Integrate Sources subdiagram shows the following blueprint elements.

Figure 2. The Integrate Sources subdiagram

The Integrate Sources subdiagram has a blueprint element called Exceptions. All other blueprint elements in Integrate Sources (Structured Sources, Extract/Subscribe, Staging, Transform, and Cleanse) are subdiagrams. When you nest subdiagrams, you create a display of your blueprint that shows more complexity and detail as you drill down into the information project.

The Integrate Sources subdiagram refers to a blueprint element called Structured Sources (Ref). A reference element is a blueprint element that refers to a blueprint element in the root diagram or in a different subdiagram.

Arrows between blueprint elements indicate a connection between the blueprint elements. Blueprint elements have generic input and output connectors that indicate the direction of action. In this example, Extract/Subscribe blueprint element refers to the information flows to a warehouse. After that action, the Staging blueprint element refers to the process in which a unified schema is discovered from the assets. The Cleanse blueprint element refers to an ongoing action on the unified schema. This action produces a list of exceptions and data that was transformed and loaded to a target system.