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Author: The MITRE Corporation
A recent McKinsey report titled “Superagency in the workplace: Empowering people to unlock AI’s full potential ” notes that “Over the next three years, 92 percent of companies plan to increase their AI investments”. They go on to say that companies need to think strategically about how they incorporate AI. Two areas that are highlighted are “federated governance models” and “human centricity.” Where teams can create and understand AI models that work for them, while having a centralized framework to monitor and manage these models. This is where the federated knowledge graph comes into play.
For data and IT leaders architecting modern enterprise platforms, the federated knowledge graph is a powerful architecture and design pattern for data management, providing semantic integration across distributed data ecosystems. When implemented with the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, a federated knowledge graph becomes the foundation for context-aware automation, bridging your data mesh or data fabric with scalable and explainable AI.Â
A knowledge graph represents data as a network of entities (nodes) and relationships (edges), enriched with semantics (ontologies, taxonomies, metadata). Rather than organizing data by rows and columns, it models how concepts relate to one another.Â
An example being, “Customer X purchased Product Y from Store Z on Date D.” Â
A federated knowledge graph goes one step further. It connects disparate, distributed datasets across your organization into a virtual semantic graph without moving the underlying data from the systems. Â
In other words:Â
This enables both humans and machines to navigate the graph to answer questions, infer new knowledge, or automate actions, all based on context that spans multiple systems.Â
Your customer data lives in a cloud-based CRM, order data in SAP, and web analytics in a cloud data warehouse. Traditionally, you’d need a complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipeline to join these datasets.  Â
With a federated knowledge graph:Â
This kind of insight is what drives intelligent automation. Â
Knowledge graphs are currently utilized in various applications, particularly in recommendation engines. However, the federated approach addresses cross-domain integration, which is especially important in large enterprises.Â
Federation in this context means:Â
This makes federated knowledge graphs especially useful in environments where data is distributed by design–across departments, cloud platforms, and business units.Â
AI automation relies not only on data, but also on understanding. A federated knowledge graph provides that understanding in several ways:Â
For data engineers and IT teams, this means less time spent maintaining pipelines and more time enabling intelligent applications. Â
Federated knowledge graphs are not just an addition to your modern data architecture; they amplify its capabilities. For instance:Â
Not only do they complement each other in a complex architectural setup, but when powered by a federated knowledge graph, they enable a scalable, intelligent data ecosystem.Â
For technical leaders, AI automation is about giving models the context to reason and act effectively. A federated knowledge graph provides the scalable, semantic foundation that AI needs, and the Actian Data Intelligence Platform makes it a reality.
The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is built on a federated knowledge graph, transforming your fragmented data landscape into a connected, AI-ready knowledge layer, delivering an accessible implementation on-ramp through:Â
Take a product tour today to experience data intelligence powered by a federated knowledge graph.Â
The post Why Federated Knowledge Graphs are the Missing Link in Your AI Strategy appeared first on Actian.
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Author: Actian Corporation
Today, organizations and individuals face an ever-growing challenge: the sheer volume of data being generated and stored across various systems. This data needs to be properly organized, categorized, and made easily accessible for efficient decision-making. One critical aspect of organizing data is through the use of metadata, which serves as a descriptive layer that helps users understand, find, and utilize data effectively.
Among the various types of metadata, structural metadata plays a crucial role in facilitating improved data management and discovery. This article will define what structural metadata is, why it is useful, and how the Actian Data Intelligence Platform can help organizations better organize and manage their structural metadata to enhance data discovery.
Metadata is often classified into various types, such as descriptive metadata, administrative metadata, and structural metadata. While descriptive metadata provides basic information about the data (e.g., title, author, keywords), and administrative metadata focuses on the management and lifecycle of data (e.g., creation date, file size, permissions), structural metadata refers to the organizational elements that describe how data is structured within a dataset or system.
In simpler terms, structural metadata defines the relationships between the different components of a dataset. It provides the blueprint for how data is organized, linked, and formatted, making it easier for users to navigate complex datasets. In a relational database, for example, structural metadata would define how tables, rows, columns, and relationships between entities are arranged. In a document repository, it could describe the format and organization of files, such as chapters, sections, and subsections.
Here are some key aspects of structural metadata:
Structural metadata plays a fundamental role in ensuring that data is understandable, accessible, and usable. Here are several reasons why it is essential:
Despite its importance, managing structural metadata is not without challenges.
The Actian Data Intelligence Platform provides organizations with the tools to handle their metadata efficiently. By enabling centralized metadata management, organizations can easily catalog and manage structural metadata, thereby enhancing data discovery and improving overall data governance. Here’s how the platform can help:
The Actian Data Intelligent Platform allows organizations to centralize all metadata, including structural metadata, into a single, unified repository. This centralization makes it easier to manage, search, and access data across different systems and platforms. No matter where the data resides, users can access the metadata and understand how datasets are structured, enabling faster data discovery.
The platform supports the automated ingestion of metadata from a wide range of data sources, including databases, data lakes, and cloud storage platforms. This automation reduces the manual effort required to capture and maintain metadata, ensuring that structural metadata is always up to date and accurately reflects the structure of the underlying datasets.
With Actian’s platform, organizations can visualize data lineage and track the relationships between different data elements. This feature allows users to see how data flows through various systems and how different datasets are connected. By understanding these relationships, users can better navigate complex datasets and conduct more meaningful analyses.
The Actian Data Intelligence Platform provides powerful data classification and tagging capabilities that allow organizations to categorize data based on its structure, type, and other metadata attributes. This helps users quickly identify the types of data they are working with and make more informed decisions about how to query and analyze it.
The platform’s metadata catalog enables users to easily search and find datasets based on specific structural attributes. Whether looking for datasets by schema, data format, or relationships, users can quickly pinpoint relevant data, which speeds up the data discovery process and improves overall efficiency.
Actian’s platform fosters collaboration by providing a platform where users can share insights, metadata definitions, and best practices. This transparency ensures that everyone in the organization is on the same page when it comes to understanding the structure of data, which is essential for data governance and compliance.
Using a federated knowledge graph, organizations can automatically identify, classify, and track data assets based on contextual and semantic factors. This makes it easier to map assets to key business concepts, manage regulatory compliance, and mitigate risks.
Managing and organizing metadata is more important than ever in the current technological climate. Structural metadata plays a crucial role in ensuring that datasets are organized, understandable, and accessible. By defining the relationships, formats, and hierarchies of data, structural metadata enables better data discovery, integration, and analysis.
However, managing this metadata can be a complex and challenging task, especially as datasets grow and become more fragmented. That’s where the Actian Data Intelligence Platform comes in. With Actian’s support, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data, streamline their data management processes, and ensure that their data governance practices are aligned with industry standards, all while improving efficiency and collaboration across teams.
Take a tour of the Actian Data Intelligence Platform or sign up for a personalized demonstration today.
The post Understanding Structural Metadata appeared first on Actian.
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Author: Actian Corporation
In Part 1 of this series, we established the strategic foundation for external data success: defining your organizational direction, determining specific data requirements, and selecting the right data providers. We also introduced the critical concept of external data stewardship — identifying key stakeholders who bridge the gap between business requirements and technical implementation. This second part […]
The post External Data Strategy: Governance, Implementation, and Success (Part 2) appeared first on DATAVERSITY.
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Author: Subasini Periyakaruppan
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The federal government’s proposal to impose a 10-year freeze on state-level AI regulation isn’t happening in a vacuum but in direct response to California. The state’s AI Accountability Act (SB 1047) has been making waves for its ambition to hold developers of powerful AI models accountable through mandatory safety testing, public disclosures, and the creation of a new regulatory […]
The post Future-Proofing AI Under a Federal Umbrella: What a 10-Year State Regulation Freeze Means appeared first on DATAVERSITY.
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Author: Dev Nag
In today’s data-driven business environment, the ability to leverage external information sources has become a critical differentiator between market leaders and laggards. Organizations that successfully harness external data don’t just gather more information – they transform how they understand their customers, anticipate market shifts, and identify growth opportunities. However, the path from recognizing the need for […]
The post External Data Strategy: From Vision to Vendor Selection (Part 1) appeared first on DATAVERSITY.
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Author: Subasini Periyakaruppan
This blog introduces Actian’s Spring 2025 launch, featuring 15 new capabilities that improve data governance, observability, productivity, and end-to-end integration across the data stack.
Actian’s Spring 2025 launch introduces 15 powerful new capabilities across our cloud and on-premises portfolio that help modern data teams navigate complex data landscapes while delivering ongoing business value.
Whether you’re a data steward working to establish governance at the source, a data engineer seeking to reduce incident response times, or a business leader looking to optimize data infrastructure costs, these updates deliver immediate, measurable impact.
Leading this launch is an upgrade to our breakthrough data contract first functionality that enables true decentralized data management with enterprise-wide federated governance, allowing data producers to build and publish trusted data assets while maintaining centralized control. Combined with AI-powered natural language search through Ask AI and enhanced observability with custom SQL metrics, our cloud portfolio delivers real value for modern data teams.
The Actian Data Intelligence Platform (formerly Zeenea) now supports a complete data products and contracts workflow. Achieve scalable, decentralized data management by enabling individual domains to design, manage, and publish tailored data products into a federated data marketplace for broader consumption.
Combined with governance-by-design through data contracts integrated into CI/CD pipelines, this approach ensures governed data from source to consumption, keeping metadata consistently updated.Â
Organizations no longer need to choose between development velocity and catalog accuracy; they can achieve both simultaneously. Data producers who previously spent hours on labor-intensive tasks can now focus on quickly building data products, while business users gain access to consistently trustworthy data assets with clear contracts for proper usage.Â
Ask AI, an AI-powered natural language query system, changes how users interact with their data catalog. Users can ask questions in plain English and receive contextually relevant results with extractive summaries.
This semantic search capability goes far beyond traditional keyword matching. Ask AI understands the intent, searches across business glossaries and data models, and returns not just matching assets but concise summaries that directly answer the question. The feature automatically identifies whether users are asking questions versus performing keyword searches, adapting the search mechanism accordingly.
Business analysts no longer need to rely on data engineers to interpret data definitions, and new team members can become productive immediately without extensive training on the data catalog.
Complementing Ask AI, our new Chrome Extension automatically highlights business terms and KPIs within BI tools. When users hover over highlighted terms, they instantly see standardized definitions pulled directly from the data catalog, without leaving their reports or dashboards.
For organizations with complex BI ecosystems, this feature improves data literacy while ensuring consistent interpretation of business metrics across teams.
Our expanded BI tool integration provides automated metadata extraction and detailed field-to-field lineage for both Tableau and Power BI environments.
For data engineers managing complex BI environments, this eliminates the manual effort required to trace data lineage across reporting tools. When business users question the accuracy of a dashboard metric, data teams can now provide complete lineage information in seconds.
Actian Data Observability now supports fully custom SQL metrics. Unlike traditional observability tools that limit monitoring to predefined metrics, this capability allows teams to create unlimited metric time series using the full expressive power of SQL.
The impact on data reliability is immediate and measurable. Teams can now detect anomalies in business-critical metrics before they affect downstream systems or customer-facing applications.Â
When data issues occur, context is everything. Our enhanced notification system now embeds visual representations of key metrics directly within email and Slack alerts. Data teams get immediate visual context about the severity and trend of issues without navigating to the observability tool.
This visual approach to alerting transforms incident response workflows. On-call engineers can assess the severity of issues instantly and prioritize their response accordingly.Â
Every detected data incident now automatically creates a JIRA ticket with relevant context, metrics, and suggested remediation steps. This seamless integration ensures no data quality issues slip through the cracks while providing a complete audit trail for compliance and continuous improvement efforts.
Managing data connections across large organizations has always been a delicate balance between security and agility. Our redesigned connection creation flow addresses this challenge by enabling central IT teams to manage credentials and security configurations while allowing distributed data teams to manage their data assets independently.
This decoupled approach means faster time-to-value for new data initiatives without compromising security or governance standards.
We’ve added wildcard support for Google Cloud Storage file paths, enabling more flexible monitoring of dynamic and hierarchical data structures. Teams managing large-scale data lakes can now monitor entire directory structures with a single configuration, automatically detecting new files and folders as they’re created.
Our DataConnect 12.4 release delivers powerful new capabilities for organizations that require on-premises data management solutions, with enhanced automation, privacy protection, and data preparation features.
The new Inspect and Recommend feature analyzes datasets and automatically suggests context-appropriate quality rules.
This capability addresses one of the most significant barriers to effective data quality management: the time and expertise required to define comprehensive quality rules for diverse datasets. Instead of requiring extensive manual analysis, users can now generate, customize, and implement effective quality rules directly from their datasets in minutes.
We now support multi-field, conditional profiling and remediation rules, enabling comprehensive, context-aware data quality assessments. These advanced rules can analyze relationships across multiple fields, not just individual columns, and automatically trigger remediation actions when quality issues are detected.
For organizations with stringent compliance requirements, this capability is particularly valuable.Â
The new Data Quality Index feature provides a simple, customizable dashboard that allows non-technical stakeholders to quickly understand the quality level of any dataset. Organizations can configure custom dimensions and weights for each field, ensuring that quality metrics align with specific business priorities and use cases.
Instead of technical quality metrics that require interpretation, the Data Quality Index provides clear, business-relevant indicators that executives can understand and act upon.
Our new data preparation functionality enables users to augment and standardize schemas directly within the platform, eliminating the need for separate data preparation tools. This integrated approach offers the flexibility to add, reorder, or standardize data as needed while maintaining data integrity and supporting scalable operations.
Expanded data privacy capabilities provide sophisticated masking and anonymization options to help organizations protect sensitive information while maintaining data utility for analytics and development purposes. These capabilities are essential for organizations subject to regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PCI-DSS.
Beyond compliance requirements, these capabilities enable safer data sharing with third parties, partners, and research teams.Â
The post Data Contracts, AI Search, and More: Actian’s Spring ’25 Product Launch appeared first on Actian.
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Author: Dee Radh
In our fast-paced, interconnected digital world, data is truly the heartbeat of how organizations make decisions. However, the rapid explosion of data in terms of volume, speed, and diversity has brought about significant challenges in keeping that data reliable and high-quality. Relying on traditional manual methods for data governance just doesn’t cut it anymore; in […]
The post Improving Data Quality Using AI and ML appeared first on DATAVERSITY.
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Author: Udaya Veeramreddygari
The banking industry is one of the most heavily regulated sectors, and as financial services evolve, the challenges of managing, governing, and ensuring compliance with vast amounts of information have grown exponentially. With the introduction of stringent regulations, increasing data privacy concerns, and growing customer expectations for seamless service, banks face complex data governance challenges. These challenges include managing large volumes of sensitive data, maintaining data integrity, ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks, and improving data transparency for both internal and external stakeholders.
In this article, we explore the core data governance challenges faced by the banking industry and how the Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps banking organizations navigate these challenges. From ensuring compliance with financial regulations to improving data transparency and integrity, the platform offers a comprehensive solution to help banks unlock the true value of their data while maintaining robust governance practices.
The financial services sector generates and manages massive volumes of data daily, spanning customer accounts, transactions, risk assessments, compliance checks, and much more. Managing this data effectively and securely is vital to ensure the smooth operation of financial institutions and to meet regulatory and compliance requirements. Financial institutions must implement robust data governance to ensure data quality, security, integrity, and transparency.
At the same time, banks must balance regulatory requirements, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction. This requires implementing systems that can handle increasing amounts of data while maintaining compliance with local and international regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, Basel III, and MiFID II.
Below are some common hurdles and challenges facing organizations in the banking industry.
With the rise of data breaches and increasing concerns about consumer privacy, banks are under immense pressure to safeguard sensitive customer information. Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have made data protection a top priority for financial institutions. Ensuring that data is appropriately stored, accessed, and shared is vital for compliance, but it’s also vital for maintaining public trust.
Banks operate in a highly regulated environment, where compliance with numerous financial regulations is mandatory. Financial regulations are continuously evolving, and keeping up with changes in the law requires financial institutions to adopt efficient data governance practices that allow them to demonstrate compliance.
For example, Basel III outlines requirements for the management of banking risk and capital adequacy, while MiFID II requires detailed reporting on market activities and transaction records. In this landscape, managing compliance through data governance is no small feat.
Many financial institutions operate in a fragmented environment, where data is stored across multiple systems, databases, and departments. This lack of integration can make it difficult to access and track data effectively. For banks, this fragmentation into data silos complicates the management of data governance processes, especially when it comes to ensuring data accuracy, consistency, and completeness.
Ensuring the integrity and transparency of data is a major concern in the banking industry. Banks need to be able to trace the origins of data, understand how it’s been used and modified, and provide visibility into its lifecycle. This is particularly important for audits, regulatory reporting, and risk management processes.
As financial institutions grow and manage increasing amounts of data, operational efficiency in data management becomes increasingly challenging. Ensuring compliance with regulations, conducting audits, and reporting on data use can quickly become burdensome without the right data governance tools in place. Manual processes are prone to errors and inefficiencies, which can have costly consequences for banks.
The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is designed to help organizations tackle the most complex data governance challenges. With its comprehensive set of tools, The platform supports banks by helping ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, improving data transparency and integrity, and creating a more efficient and organized data governance strategy.
Here’s how the Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps the banking industry overcome its data governance challenges.
The Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps banks achieve regulatory compliance by automating compliance monitoring, data classification, and metadata management.
Data transparency and integrity are critical for financial institutions, particularly when it comes to meeting regulatory requirements for reporting and audit purposes. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers tools that ensure data is accurately tracked and fully transparent, which helps improve data governance practices within the bank.
Fragmented data and siloed systems are a common challenge for financial institutions. Data often resides in disparate databases or platforms across different departments, making it difficult to access and track efficiently. The platform provides the tools to integrate data governance processes and eliminate silos.
Manual processes in data governance can be time-consuming and prone to errors, making it challenging for banks to keep pace with the growing volumes of data and increasing regulatory demands. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s platform automates and streamlines key aspects of data governance, allowing banks to work more efficiently and focus on higher-value tasks.
The banking industry faces a range of complex data governance challenges. To navigate these challenges, they need robust data governance frameworks and powerful tools to help manage their vast data assets.
The Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers a comprehensive data governance solution that helps financial institutions tackle these challenges head-on. By providing automated compliance monitoring, metadata tracking, data lineage, and a centralized data catalog, the platform ensures that banks can meet regulatory requirements while improving operational efficiency, data transparency, and data integrity.
Actian offers an online product tour of the Actian Data Intelligence Platform as well as personalized demos of how the data intelligence platform can transform and enhance financial institutions’ data strategies.
The post Tackling Complex Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry appeared first on Actian.
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Author: Actian Corporation
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Data has evolved from a byproduct of business operations into a strategic asset — one that demands thoughtful oversight and intentional governance. As organizations increasingly rely on data to drive decisions, compliance, and innovation, the role of the data steward has taken on new urgency and importance.
Data stewards are responsible for managing the quality and accessibility of data within an organization. They play a critical role in ensuring that data governance policies are followed and that data is properly utilized across the organization. In this article, we will explore the role of data stewards, their responsibilities, and how platforms like the Actian Data Intelligence Platform can help streamline and optimize their efforts in managing data governance.
Data stewardship refers to the practice of defining, managing, overseeing, and ensuring the quality of data and data assets within an organization. It is a fundamental aspect of data governance, which is a broader strategy for managing data across the organization in a way that ensures compliance, quality, security, and value. While data governance focuses on the overall structure, policies, and rules for managing data, data stewardship is the hands-on approach to ensuring that those policies are adhered to and that data is kept accurate, consistent, and reliable.
Data stewards are the custodians of an organization’s data. They are the bridge between technical teams and business users, ensuring that data meets the needs of the organization while adhering to governance and regulatory standards.
Below are some of the key responsibilities of data stewards within a data governance framework.
Data stewards ensure data quality across the organization. They ensure data is accurate, consistent, complete, and up to date. They are tasked with establishing data quality standards and monitoring data to ensure that it meets these criteria. Data stewards are also responsible for identifying and addressing data quality issues, such as duplicates, missing data, or inconsistencies.
Data stewards are responsible for organizing and classifying data—applying metadata, managing access controls, and ensuring sensitive information is properly handled—to make data accessible, understandable, and secure for stakeholders.
Data stewards ensure that the organization follows data governance policies and procedures. They monitor and enforce compliance with data governance standards and regulatory requirements such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.
Data stewards define and enforce data access policies, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive or restricted data. They also monitor for violations of governance policy.
Data stewards oversee the entire data lifecycle, from creation and storage to deletion and archiving.
Data stewards work closely with stakeholders in the data governance ecosystem, including data owners, data engineers, business analysts, and IT teams. They ensure that data governance practices are aligned with business goals. Data stewards are responsible for bridging the gap between technical and business teams, ensuring that the data is aligned with both technical requirements and business objectives.
Data stewards are responsible for documenting data governance policies, standards, and procedures. This documentation is essential for audits, regulatory compliance, and internal training.
Data stewards play a crucial role in the success of an organization’s data governance framework. They are responsible for managing data quality, ensuring compliance, monitoring data access, and maintaining data integrity. By leveraging the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, data stewards can streamline their responsibilities and more effectively govern data across the organization.
With the platform’s centralized data catalog, automated data quality monitoring, data lineage tracking, and compliance tools, data stewards are empowered to maintain high-quality data, ensure regulatory compliance, and foster collaboration between stakeholders.
Request a personalized demo of the Actian Data Intelligence Platform today.
The post The Role of Data Stewards in Data Governance appeared first on Actian.
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Author: Actian Corporation