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Problem
Reference data is used extensively throughout applications and business services to capture and manage state, statuses and different variations of categorizations. It is not uncommon for the reference data to be duplicated throughout services and applications causing significant redundancy and accuracy issues.
Reference data often requires version management and can be subject to complex hierarchies including one to many, many to many and many to one relationships.
Solution
Reference data can be physically abstracted and managed as a dedicated part of the architecture in a central location, accessed using a centralized reference data utility service. Business services and applications can access the reference data service and benefit from a centralized consistent view of the reference data for both business specific and generic reference data.
Application
A centralized reference data service is established to provide an official access point for the retrieval and management of reference data.
The actual application of the reference data will vary depending on the organizations requirements. In particular it may be employed to perform the following tasks:
Provide master flat lists to applications and services. Examples:
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Get all Claims Types
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Get all Rating Types for a Quote
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Get all Address Types
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Provide master hierarchical lists to applications and services. Examples:
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Get all Counties for a States
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Get all States for a Country
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Provide lookups and translations between enterprise and legacy reference data. This strategy is often taken when a business service must connect to multiple legacy systems to perform the same activity depending on business unit, product line etc. The reference data values supported in the Canonical Schema will often not be the same as what the legacy system requires and translation is required.
Figure 1: Services and applications use the reference data service to retrieve and manage all reference data values and relationships.
Impacts
Because the reference data and its corresponding services are applied across the entire service inventory, a number of impacts can occur:
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Performance requirements and latency becomes a factor. A reference data service can be designed with caching in mind to reduce these impacts.
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Version management becomes more important. Without version management the reference data cannot provide a picture over time and is subject to being latest only.
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Legacy applications may not be able to access the reference data if not service enabled. Duplication and redundancy may still occur and needs to be managed effectively.
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