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0110 Actors

Actors are the people, teams or machines that drive activity in the organization's landscape.

UML

ActorProfile

An ActorProfile describes an entity to store and link information about an actor in open metadata. It inherits from Referenceable so it has a unique name.

  • name - the display name of the profile - such as the preferred name of a person, the commonly used name for a team or a process. This name is not necessarily unique.

  • description - the description of the actor that this profile represents.

The subtypes of ActorProfile add further information about actors:

  • Person for profiles describing individuals.
  • Team for profiles describing teams.
  • ITProfile for profiles describing specific IT processes and systems.

ProfileLocation

The ProfileLocation relationship identifies an association between an ActorProfile and a Location, such as a person's primary work location. The associationType property records the purpose of the association. Its value can be defined in a ValidValueSet.

ContactDetails

ContactDetails describe the mechanisms to contact an actor - this is typically linked to actor profiles for people and teams.

  • contactMethodType - the type of communication method:

    • EMAIL - email
    • PHONE - landline or mobile
    • CHAT - instant messaging
    • PROFILE - add message to actor profile
    • ACCOUNT - via an application account
    • OTHER - another type of contact method

  • contactMethodService - the type of service to call to invoke this contact method.

  • contactMethodValue - the address or account name or number to use for this contact method.

UserIdentity

Most metadata repositories are run in a secure mode requiring incoming requests to include the requester’s security credentials. Therefore, we have an identifier for each unique logged on security identity (aka userId). This identity is recorded in the header of the metadata elements when they are created or updated.

UserIdentity provides a structure for storing details about a particular userId. Initially we have a simple string for the userId - but this could be extended to include more sophisticated identification information.

  • distinguishedName - the fully qualified name in LDAP.

ProfileIdentity

ProfileIdentity links the ActorProfile to one or more UserIdentity entities. This allows the calling user's profile to be retrieved from the incoming userId. The attributes for ProfileIdentity help to pick the right UserIdentity based on PersonRole when navigating from the ActorProfile to multiple UserIdentity entities:

  • roleTypeName: the type of role that the UserIdentity is used for.
  • roleGUID: the unique identifier of the specific role that the UserIdentity is used for.
  • description: a human-readable description of the use of the UserIdentity by the actor.

Further information

People, Roles and Organizations describes how metadata about people is populated and used.

The following APIs support actor profiles:

  • The Community Profile OMAS provides support for managing metadata about people and teams.

  • The Organization Integrator OMIS supports the synchronization of information about people and teams between open metadata and external systems.

  • The IT Infrastructure OMAS provides support for managing profile and user identity metadata for assets such as processes and connectors.

  • The Infrastructure Integrator OMIS supports the synchronization of IT profiles between open metadata and external system definitions.

  • The Security Manager OMAS provides support for retrieving metadata for all types of actor profiles and user identities metadata.

  • The Security Integrator OMIS supports the publishing of all types of actor profiles and user identities between open metadata and external security management systems.

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