Anjana Data V2.0: usability improvements and new customisation capabilities for the CORE metamodel

Anjana Data launches its 2.0 version with improved functionalities and new configuration, adaptation and customisation features to implement agile, flexible, proactive and collaborative data governance.

The year 2020 has brought for Anjana Data an evolution in terms of its functionalities and features, both technical and usability, which provide a differential value in the ultimate goal of achieving an effective and efficient Data Governance, necessary to turn data into a strategic asset of any organisation.

Following the same vision and philosophy of the collaborative approach focusing on metadata, In the past, work has been carried out on four main tracks:

• Facilitate the consumption of information by the different stakeholders and expand the capacity for interaction between them with improved usability.
• Make the CORE metamodel more flexible so that it adapts to the needs of the organisation, offering new extension and adaptation capabilities.
• Extend the configuration and maintenance capabilities of the governance model.
• Technology integration with different platforms to offer end-2-end automation and increased interoperability capabilities through APIs.

Below we detail the new functionalities offered by Anjana Data version 2.0:

UX and UI improvements

With the premise of delivering a version that is easy to use and that fulfils the function of being the central solution for data governance in an organisation, Anjana Data presents improvements in user experience and user interface through substantial changes in different screens of the application such as the Data Portal, object detail views, lineage graphs, workflow management and the Administration Panel. 

The Data Portal includes a more advanced and optimised search engine, dynamic filters, new and more intuitive icons and more condensed information to facilitate the search and discovery of governed data assets. In addition, the solution now allows the visualisation of object properties with different views to adapt to the user's consumption needs and also simplifies the process of mass loading of objects both from Excel and by automatic import using the available connectors or the API.

In relation to the lineage and traceability graphs, new elements are included to facilitate their interpretation, such as the representation of users attached to DSAs, directional arrows indicating the direction of data flow (datasets input >> process/instance >> datasets output) and the differentiation of related process instances from those for solutions.

With regard to the visualisation of workflows, new ways of consuming information are also available in order to have an overall view of the requests, facilitating their follow-up and offering the possibility of having all the detail available at the click of a button.

Finally, to facilitate the configuration and administration of the solution, a new front end is presented from which all the tasks of parameterisation, management and maintenance of the governance model can be carried out graphically. (business areas, roles, users, permissions, workflows, taxonomies, passive vs active governance, connections, parameter catalogues, tags, ...).

CORE 2.0 Metamodel

In the new version, Anjana Data's CORE Metamodel has not only been extended with additional metadata but also now offers the possibility to modify the templates for the different objects. This allows centralising the management of taxonomies and the inclusion of new metadata over time, according to the needs of the organisation.

In addition, users will be able to add specific metadata to individual objects according to their permission settings and predefined catalogues of data types will be available for some fields based on supported technologies and formats.

Active governance and dynamic lineage agnostic to technology and on new platforms natively

Being the only data governance platform that offers active governance and dynamic lineage agnostic to data storage and processing technologies is not easy, which is why this new version of Anjana Data brings with it a new simplified architecture, specifically designed to facilitate interaction with any technology through the use of services and offering in-memory compute capabilities with unlimited horizontal scalability (yes, unlimited, in true Big Data style).

Also, to enable full interoperability and ensure fast and easy integration into any technology scenario, Anjana Data has a new optimised, fully documented public API layer. This layer has been extended with new functions to offer the full capabilities of Anjana Data to the outside world both inbound and outbound.

In addition, work has continued on native integration with different vendors and technologies such as the entire Cloudera stack (CDH and CDP), any stand-alone Hadoop cluster using technologies such as Sentry, HDFS, Impala, Hive, Spark 2.x, ... and support for all technologies that comply with the JDBC standard (relational databases, mostly both on-premise and in the cloud).

In this way, a solution has evolved that offers the different roles involved a better working dynamic and optimal metadata management that facilitates the extraction of business value and decision making.

The future of Anjana Data

This new version offers our customers a major leap in quality but, of course, we are already developing the next version which will be launched in April this year, what will we find in this next version?

• New native integration capabilities with different platforms and technologies, which we will announce as we close the corresponding partnership agreements that we are in the process of negotiating.
• The new jewel in the crown, a module of the State-of-the-art Business Glossary, fully flexible and configurable to adapt to the semantic vision of any organisation, but 100% connected to our central metamodel, offering the possibility of a complete data journey both top-down and bottom-up.
• Dynamic forms advanced tools for template management and object composition.
• Redesign of some interfaces and inclusion of UX and UI improvements with the aim of making Anjana Data's web application increasingly simple and intuitive and favouring the interaction of different types of roles and users.
• And, the icing on the cake, care capacities for some functionalities, thanks to the analysis of user behaviour and the inclusion of advanced analytics algorithms in the background. What everyone likes to call “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning”.