Process¶

A process describes an activity: a well-defined set of processing steps and decisions that drive some aspect of the organization's business. Most processes are automated with software, but a process may equally be a manual procedure performed by a person or a team.

A process is a type of asset. This is deliberate - a process is something the organization owns, depends on and must govern, in exactly the same way as the data it operates on. It can therefore be catalogued, assigned an owner, placed in a governance zone and secured.

Processes and lineage¶

Processes are what connect assets together in lineage. The data flowing into and out of a process is described using ports, each with a schema describing the structure of the data it carries. Following the ports from asset to process to asset is what produces a lineage graph.

The ProcessHierarchy relationship defines a parent-child relationship between processes. This allows an abstract, business-level process to be decomposed into the lower-level processes that implement it, so that lineage can be viewed at whatever altitude the question requires.

Describing the activity¶

Alongside the normal asset properties, a process records its lifecycle: requestedTime, requestedStartTime, startTime, dueTime, lastReviewTime, lastPauseTime, lastResumeTime and completionTime, together with an activityStatus. The expectedBehaviour property describes what the person or automated process is supposed to do.

Specializations¶

• A DeployedSoftwareComponent is a code asset deployed to implement a software capability. It records the deployedImplementationType and implementationLanguage, and its interface is described by an API schema.
• A DeployedConnector is a connector - a specialist software component providing pluggable access to third party technology through the Open Connector Framework.
• An EmbeddedProcess is a processing element nested inside a deployed software component. A TransientEmbeddedProcess is one that runs only briefly - relevant because each run may have different lineage, so the start and end times are recorded on the element itself.
• A FunctionCall describes a call to an external function.
• A governance action process is the process type Egeria uses to automate its own governance.

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