0461 Governance Engines¶

A governance engine is a software capability that is able to run specific services on demand. These services, called governance services, typically implement specific logic that is needed to govern an organization's resources or the metadata associated with them.

Open metadata recognizes three types of governance engine:

Governance action engines and services support the active governance of metadata and the resources they represent. There are different types of governance action engines/services that are defined by the Governance Action Framework (GAF).
Discovery engines and services support the analysis of real world resources. The results of this analysis are stored in a discovery analysis report chained off of the corresponding Asset metadata element. The interfaces for discovery are found in the Open Discovery Framework (ODF).
Repository governance engines and services support the maintenance of open metadata archives that are defined in the Open Metadata Repository Services (OMRS).

The capability of a governance engine is specified in a governance engine definition. This is a collection of open metadata elements starting with an entity of the appropriate GovernanceEngine subtype. This is linked to GovernanceService entities via the SupportedGovernanceService relationship. The requestType property in this relationship is used to map an incoming governance request type passed to the running governance engine into a governance service to invoke. The requestParameters provide initial values of the request parameters passed to the governance services when it is called. These are overlaid by any request parameters supplied by the caller.

Governance services are specialist connectors. They are represented in open metadata using the GovernanceService entity which is a specialization of DeployedConnector. This entity is linked to a Connection entity via a ConnectionToAsset relationship.

UML

Further information

The Open Metadata Engine Services (OMES) support the implementation of each type of governance engine. They run in an Engine Host OMAG Server and draw their configuration from the GovernanceEngine and the linked GovernanceService elements in the associated metadata server.

The type definitions for discovery engines and services are shown in model 0601.