Executive Summary¶
The EKG Maturity Model (EKG/Maturity) is the industry-standard definition of the capabilities required for an EKG and of the generic capabilities in any given organization that are affected by EKG.
It establishes standard criteria for measuring progress and sets out the practical questions that all involved stakeholders ask to ensure trust, confidence and usage flexibility of data. Each capability area provides a business summary denoting its importance, a definition of the added value from semantic standards and scoring criteria based on five levels of defined maturity.
EKG/Maturity is a capability model designed to promulgate best practices across the knowledge graph community. It covers essential capabilities as well as standard evaluation criteria required for the design, implementation, and maintenance of an EKG.
The Maturity Model for the Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG/Maturity) is one of the key initiatives of the Enterprise Knowledge Graph Foundation being developed by a community of contributors.
The Foundation hosts open working sessions to debate the contents toward the achievement of consensus.
Vision and Expectation Management¶
It captures our thinking around the vision of EKG, how it affects your business and what can be expected of it at certain levels of capability maturity.
Non-functional requirements¶
The maturity model is therefore seen as the overall framework for all "non-functional requirements" (NFRs)---clustered per capability---that are not directly related to any given "use case".
Use Case Tree¶
For instance, if it is your company's strategy to be able to have real-time risk insights at all levels of your organization then we can separate the specific functional requirements of that very large use case from all the non-functional requirements that would come into place around your data management and governance practices, the state of your technology landscape, the culture of your organization and so forth. In this example, the use case Real-time risk management---as the top-level strategic use case---would be broken down into various sub-use cases resulting in a so-called "Use Case Tree" (UCT). Each node in that tree represents some functionality---a capability so you will. How does this relate to the maturity model? Well, per use case in that tree structure you can determine how realistic it is to actually be able to implement that use case in relation to the level of maturity of the organization as a whole and more specifically in relation to any of the capabilities that are being covered in this document.
Use Cases Replace Silos¶
Another major point to make about the Use Case Trees is that it is the backbone component-structure of your EKG. In a way you could see them as the EKG's equivalent of your current siloed application- and data-landscape. Rather than building a new silo everytime for every new use case, you would "build" new use cases in the EKG. Use cases are logical silos in that sense. In a data-centric EKG world, there are no more independent applications that are run as separate systems. Just this particular change alone has major implications on how things are organized. EKG/Maturity covers these---and many other---implications.
Capabilities as Use Cases¶
The maturity model is about the generic capabilities and how they may evolve over time and how some of them are required to be available at a certain level of maturity. That being said, almost every capability that we describe in this document is in itself also a use case. Many if not most of these capabilities will more and more depend on high quality detailed and "holistic" data.