The term Common Data Model describes at least five related capabilities or ideas:
| Capability |
Details |
| A way to describe the location and shape of data records that are stored in files. |
- This is also called a Common Data Model folder, because the data files are often grouped together in a data lake folder or a hierarchy of folders.
- An organizing document called a manifest acts as the entry point for a collection of entity schema definitions and data partition locations.
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| A collection of reference entities that have been published on GitHub to represent the most common shapes of data that customers may find in the business application ecosystem. |
The collection includes:- Base entities for Dataverse.
- Entities for Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Marketing.
- Industry-specific accelerator extensions to Dataverse.
- Analytic data from other services.
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| The metadata used to describe the logical concepts, compositions, and semantic meanings for, and relationships between, standard published entities or a customer's private standards or ad-hoc compositions. |
The metadata includes: - Logical classes of entities, with inheritance and containment.
- An extensible way to create rich, complex data types and to describe the semantic meaning and other metadata for entities and their attributes.
- A set of shared semantic meaning indicators for many business types and needs, such as:
- First name, email address, fiscal calendar parts, distance in meters, and more.
- Estimates, probabilities, occurrence date, and base currency.
|
| An object model library. |
The object library:- Reads, manages, and creates the Common Data Model folder metadata files.
- Creates comprehensible logical descriptions and semantic meanings for standard or custom entities.
- Generates a Common Data Model folder document and concrete entity metadata by using standard or custom entity schemas as a guide.
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| The ecosystem of applications and services. |
The ecosystem makes use of some or all of the four capabilities to help app developers work cooperatively on standardized entity shapes or share metadata. |
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