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Comment by thethimble

2 days ago

They’re not pushing a single canonical schema.

Each team still owns its local RDF graph for concepts like actor or movie. What UDA adds is a shared graph of mappings that translate between those local models whenever another team needs them.

Traditionally such translations live in scattered adapter code, which hides lineage and adds opacity - particularly as systems proliferate. By expressing the mappings as RDF triples inside UDA’s knowledge graph, they become versioned, queryable, and reusable. No more spelunking through layers of service code to understand how one team’s actor becomes another’s.

As a result, discrete teams/domains remain independent while the interconnections/relationships become first-class and introspectable. This enables coordination without centralization.

> What UDA adds is a shared graph of mappings that translate between those local models whenever another team needs them

Every such mapping is a composite definition, composed over two discrete concepts, each of which is owned/managed by discrete teams. Who gets to define/own/maintain these composite mappings? They're separate concepts, "on top of" the things they map, meaning they only exist in terms of specific versions of the underlying entities. It's just not as simple as it seems, or as is being implied here...

> As a result, discrete teams/domains remain independent while the interconnections/relationships become first-class and introspectable. This enables coordination without centralization.

What's being described here is for sure a centralized collection of definitions of mappings between interconnections/relationships.