Introduction
EGERIA is an open source metadata and governance platform that offers comprehensive support for a wide number of data management, AI and analytic use cases. The project and details about Egeria can be found at Egeria Project. We at Pragmatic Data Research, are leaders in the Egeria Community and actively contribute to its development, maintenance, and use. The Egeria Project website contains a phenomenal amount of tutorial and reference material for both technical and less technical users. However, we felt that a less formal set of material might also be helpful to augment what we provide in the official community. Hence these recipes.
We have ambitious plans for building out a set of easy to follow recipes that help users to get started with Egeria. The first group of recipes are geared towards technical users that want to get going simply. To de-mystify Egeria, we've chosen to show how we can get Egeria up and running just using a simple command line interface. Then in subsequent groups of recipes we will show how we can use the pre-built, publicly available Docker images - both by themselves and in Docker Compose orchestrations. The next group of recipes will repeat many of the same patterns - but using Helm charts and Kubernetes rather than Docker.
We are also planning on providing usage recipes for other communities - for data scientists, data stewards and data engineers. These will focus more on how to accomplish particular tasks and workflows with Egeria, rather than how to operate Egeria itself.
Glossary - some common terms...
- Java
A cup of coffee - or a mature programming language that is slowly going out of fashion because it is boringly stable (but we still like it).
- Python
A not so friendly snake or a popular programming language that is slowly tying itself in knots as it tries to subsume all programming paradigms (we like this one too).
- Data Governance
The process of actively making your data more useful and trustworthy - by paying attention to how it is used and created.
- Data Catalog
An application that gathers metadata for its users, this may include automatic cataloging. Often limited in scope, currency, and completeness.
- Data
Stuff
- Metadata
Descriptions of stuff.
- Meta Metadata
How we describe the descriptions of this stuff.
- Meta Meta Metadata
How we describe the descriptions of the descriptions of this stuff.
- Metadata Management
Managing all this stuff (recursively).
- Reference Data
Valid values of stuff. For example, city names, chemical elements, courtesy titles - and not frequently changing data like an account balance. This data widely used and distributed to operational and analytical systems. It is also, for example, used for data validation, and to populate drop-down lists on user interfaces.
- Reference Data Management
The unsung hero of data management. How we collaboratively manage the reference data and distribute it consistently across the IT landscape. Without consistent reference data we can't effectively exchange information or count stuff.
- Master Data
Data about people, places and things. This information often slowly changes and is widely used (and copied) by a combination of analytical and operational systems.
- Egeria
Does it all (mostly) - and if it doesn't do it directly, it will help you to organize it.