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CONCEPT Cited by 1 source

Golden record

Definition

In Master Data Management, a golden record is "a common, shared, and trusted view on data, also called a golden record, for a particular domain" (sources/2021-07-28-zalando-knowledge-graph-technologies-accelerate-and-improve-the-data-model-definition).

It is the canonical, consolidated representation of one subject-matter entity (e.g. one business partner, one customer, one product) after ingesting, matching, merging, cleansing, and quality-assuring records from every source system that owns a copy.

Properties

  • Single per domain entity — one golden record per business partner, not per source system.
  • Derived, not authored — produced by a consolidation pipeline over source records, not typed directly by a human.
  • Trusted — the MDM project is responsible for its quality (match correctness, merge correctness, cleanse correctness). Business stakeholders must find the golden record trustworthy, which gates adoption.
  • Stored centrally per a canonical model — the schema of the golden record is the logical data model of the MDM system.
  • Published back to sources — in consolidated-style MDM, the golden record is returned to source systems "for consideration and possible correction in their respective systems."

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