Exploring hierarchies in IBM Match 360
Create and maintain hierarchies within your master data to track hierarchical relationships between entities.
Hierarchies can be used to define many different types of relationships, including legal hierarchies, ownership hierarchies, reporting chain hierarchies, family trees, product hierarchies, and more. A well-maintained hierarchy shows you how entities relate to one another, providing a clearer, more holistic understanding of your master data. Hierarchy relationships can also provide data stewards with important identity clues during manual deduplication efforts.
Within IBM Match 360, you can model hierarchies within a single entity type or across multiple entity types. To get started with hierarchies, a data engineer must define at least one hierarchy type. For information about defining hierarchy types, see Defining hierarchy types in IBM Match 360.
After a hierarchy type has been defined, data stewards can create hierarchy instances, add or remove members, and define hierarchy relationships.
The graphical interfaces for defining and working with hierarchies are provided as a technology preview.
Creating a hierarchy
To create a new hierarchy instance:
- From the Master data navigation menu, click Search
to open the master
data search page. - From the action bar of the screen, click New Object and then choose New hierarchy.
- Select the type of hierarchy you want to add. This list depends on the hierarchy types that a data engineer has defined for this IBM Match 360 instance.
- Provide values for each required hierarchy attribute.
- Click Create and view.
After creating a hierarchy instance, you can:
- Add members to the hierarchy
- Define hierarchy relationships
- Update hierarchy attributes
- Delete the hierarchy
Updating hierarchy attributes
To update a hierarchy instance's attribute values:
- From the Hierarchy actions menu, choose Hierarchy settings.
- Edit the hierarchy attributes as needed.
- Click Save.
Opening a hierarchy
To find and open an existing hierarchy instance:
-
From the Master data navigation menu, click Data types
to open the data types page. -
Select Hierarchy types, then click the link for the hierarchy type that you are looking for. You will see a list of hierarchy instances for the selected hierarchy.
-
Click a hierarchy instance to start working with it.
Adding members to a hierarchy
When a hierarchy is first created, it does not have any members. You must add members and then define their hierarchy relationships to each other.
To add a member to a hierarchy:
-
From the hierarchy information screen, click Add member.
-
Find the member that you want to add. Choose whether you want to find the member from Recently viewed entities and records in your workspace or from a new Search. You can view details of each record or entity in the results list by hovering over the row and clicking the See details icon
. -
Select one or more members that you want to add to the hierarchy, then click Add.
Members are added as orphans, meaning that they are not yet part of the hierarchy structure because they have no relationships to other hierarchy members.
Defining hierarchy relationships
You can define multiple parent and child relationships for each member, depending on the requirements of your hierarchy. Unless a member is the ultimate parent at the top of the hierarchy, you must define at least one parent relationship to add them into the hierarchy.
To define how members relate to each other within the hierarchy:
- From the Members tab, right-click on a member or orphan node and choose Add children or Add parent.
- Select one or more of the other member or orphan nodes to relate to the member you are working with and then click either Add children or Add parent.
- From the preview screen, compare the current and proposed hierarchies. To apply the change, click Confirm.
- Right-click on any member node to access other options to help you refine your hierarchy structure.
- Continue adding members and defining relationships to build your hierarchy.
Learn more
- Defining hierarchy types in IBM Match 360
- Customizing your data types
- Adding data and mapping it to your data types
Parent topic: Exploring master data