Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
8.2.1.3.
Geographical aspect
Definition: geographical aspect
The geographical aspect enables the modeling of the
company structure from the point of view of its physical
locations, for instance via geographical sectors such as
territories, regions, countries, etc.
Applied to the MDM approach, this modeling enables the
identification of geographical contexts. Each reference and
master data can then be initialized and updated differently
depending on the context: the name of a product is different
depending on the language of the geographical sector in
which it is commercially available; a promotion rate is
adjusted depending on the region, etc. In practice, there are
often multiple contexts which can change depending on the
evolution of the company's geography and its environment.
The contexts do not only concern the geographical aspects.
They are situated in a much larger management that
embraces, for instance, multi-channels and organizations.
Therefore, a call center, a website, as subsidiary, or even a
partner is each similar to a use context. With an MDM
system, the initialization and update of the same piece of
data can be different depending on these contexts. The
addition of a new use context must not necessitate data
modeling.
In other words, the data model is established without
information about the use contexts; the geographical and
pragmatic aspects are an aid to identify them but do not
influence the way the business objects (semantic) and
administrative objects (pragmatic) are designed.
