UNITE Glossary · Ontology & Knowledge Representation

Enterprise Data Model

An enterprise data model is an organisation-wide blueprint of the data it holds — the core entities, their attributes, and the relationships between them — providing a consistent structure that spans systems so that data means the same thing wherever it is stored or used.

Individual applications each carry their own schema. An enterprise data model rises above them to define shared entities once, so "customer" or "product" is structured consistently across finance, operations, and analytics.

It differs from an ontology in emphasis. A data model focuses on how data is structured and stored; an ontology focuses on the meaning and reasoning between concepts. In practice they complement each other, and a strong data model is a natural foundation for a semantic layer above it.

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