WHAT MAKES A GOOD DATAMODEL? — POINT 5: ACCESSIBLE

Having the best datamodel in the world won’t help you grow your digital capabilities if the only way to access it is through proprietary drivers.

Being accessible means two things:

1. Using web APIs so that any system can access it; and
2. Structuring the data in a standard format

Whatever system you choose to build your data model in needs to have REST APIs, and this is really standard practice in software development now anyway.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD DATAMODEL? — POINT 5: ACCESSIBLE

Structuring the data in a standard format is a bit harder as in reality this is no one standard. There are various contenders from OPC UA to BIM and ODATA.

At Eigen we solve these problems by using Neo4j as our preferred home for Data Models. As an opensource technology it ensures that our customers are not locked in and can always access the data independently of our systems.

Neo4j has direct APIs and we build our own APIs on top of it that can serve up contextualised data according to the format required.

Do get in touch if you want to talk more about data models and class libraries (or if you have insomnia;).

To find out more:

• Read the rest of the series
• To join the conversation join us over on LinkedIn