Market Plane User Glossary
The Market Plane is where business analysts and all kinds of consumers can search and discover all the products published in Witboost, as well as accessing key information such as domain, lineage, data contracts, data schema and more.
Product
Products in the Market plane are all the published entities in the platform made available to be discoverable, explored by consumers and eventually providing a way to request access to the underlying data that is being exposed through consumables. Depending on the Data Landscape, Products take on different names, like Data Products, or Source Systems, but this is completely dependent on the platform customizations.
A Product is created as a hierarchy of consumables, developed and published by a team intending to expose data in an orderly manner. The Product may be a list of consumables, or a more complex hierarchy containing several groups of consumables sharing a common logic or access control pattern. The publication of the Product in the Market Plane happens as part of the release of a project on the Control Plane if present, or via a pipeline using the availables APIs.
Products easily show the main information like owner, description, compliance based on policies and metrics, exposed consumables, lineage with other published products, reviews, and questions. All of this information can allow you to take the best decision on which data to access.
Consumable
Consumables represent an interface where is possible to consume data governed by Witboost, and made available for exploration. These may represents physical objects like a table, a topic, an API, a conversional chat, a dashboand, etc. which eventually they are enabled to request access to. They belong to a specific product and contains themselves relevant information like description, data contracts, schema, quality, and all the information the product development team retains important to said consumable.
Consumables can also be shoppable, which means that Witboost has been configured to manage the access control flow, managing physical grant and revoke toward the physical data.
Data Contract
A data contract is a promise made by a data producer towards data consumers. The latter accepts this promise, transforming it into a contract. Witboost has out-of-the-box the architecture to create, support and govern data contracts. A consumable can have a data contract attached containining valuable information important to the consumers, like data guarantees, data properties, service level agreements (SLAs) and more. Furthermore, you can see the consumption flow of data contracts in its dedicated page of the Market Plane, highliting relationships between products.
To understand more the role of data contract in Witboost, check the Data Contracts documentation.
Lineage
Lineage, along with Data Contracts, is the main way Witboost shows relationship between products published on the Market Plane. It's a visual map of declared dependencies between products and it's intention is to show a high-level flow of data inside Witboost, including both strong and logical connections between consumables of other products and the product itself. These dependencies are defined at creation and publication time by the product development team. For more information check the Lineage documentation.
Policy/Metric
Policies and Metrics evaluate the compliance of a specific product or consumable against the guidelines defined by the governance plane (if present). Policies are shown as flags on the different pages of the Market Plane to swiftly identify the level of compliance of the products you plan to consume with the compliance define by the governance team of your organization.
The key difference between policies and metrics is that the first define whether a product complies or not with a constraint, while metrics provides a numerical value on a defined scale so it covers a larger spectrum of outputs and ranges. If you're interested in more in-depth information check the Computational Governance documentation.