Glossary
Learn the terminology and acronyms used in Reltio products and solutions.
This glossary defines common terms used across Reltio products and solutions. For a deeper dive into concepts, see https://www.reltio.com/glossary/.
A
- Agility
- The ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- The ability of machines to mimic cognitive functions typically associated with the human mind, such as learning and problem solving. AI applies advanced analysis and logic-based techniques such as Machine Learning (ML) to interpret events, support and automate decisions, and take actions.
- Authentication
- The act of verifying the identity of a user or process to validate whether they are who they claim to be.
- Authorization
- The act of granting a user or process permission to access a specific resource.
- Availability
- The ability of a user to access information or resources in a specified location and in the correct format. System availability is typically calculated as a function of its reliability, maintainability, and redundancy. Availability increases as reliability and redundancy increases and maintenance downtime decreases.
B
- Backup
- A copy of data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event, recover data after its loss from data deletion or data corruption, or recover data from an earlier time. Backups provide a simple form of disaster recovery.
C
- Client Secret JSON Web Token (JWT) Authentication
- A token-based stateless authentication method that supports Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) for centralized user management. It cryptographically signs every user or service account authorization request and provides the user with a secure token they can use across systems.
- Cloud-native computing
- An approach in software development that uses cloud computing to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds.
- Cloud service provider (CSP)
- A third-party company that offers cloud hosting services that provide the infrastructure, applications, databases, and storage for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service models. Reltio uses CSPs such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure, to create environments to deliver our software capabilities to our customers.
- Cluster
- A set of nodes in the infrastructure that is used to deliver a specific service to one or more tenants. Multiple clusters may be used in an environment to deliver the same service to different tenants in that environment. For example, a Cassandra cluster may be used to store data for some tenants.
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CICD)
- A practice of frequent code integration designed to streamline the software development lifecyle. It bridges the gap between developmental and operational activities and teams by enforcing automation in building, testing, and deploying applications in a shared code repository.
D
- Data as a Service (DaaS)
- A cloud-native computing model that provides access to business-critical data in a secure and affordable manner by eliminating redundancy and reducing costs.
- Data governance
- The policies and processes an organization establishes to secure its data, maintain and improve data quality, and ensure compliance to data access and use. The Reltio Data Cloud offers role-based access control to data and provides workflow capabilities for better data governance. Policy definition and enforcement is supported in Reltio with simple and powerful user experiences and built-in collaboration. Data lineage is maintained over the entire lifecycle to enable the tracing and managing of data across multiple source systems and data governance processes. Operations on the data, including reads, are tracked and logged for compliance purposes.
- Data migration
- The process of selecting, preparing, extracting, and transforming data and permanently transferring it from one storage system to another. The process also includes the validation of migrated data for completeness and the decommissioning of legacy data storage
- Data quality
- The measures used to determine if data suits an organization's requirements for accuracy, completeness, consistency, and validation. The Reltio Data Cloud enables users to measure, monitor, and enhance the quality of data that is managed. Data can be brought into Reltio without prior cleansing or validation. Data quality can be monitored using data validation capabilities, and issues can be fixed within the Reltio Platform or at its source. Extensive analytics and dynamic data quality scoring and segmentation capabilities provide further insights into data quality and enable data stewards to focus on the right areas for higher impact.
- Deployment
- The mechanisms used to deliver software from developers to users. Deployment services support the implementation and rollout of new applications or infrastructure to make them ready for production. The general deployment process consists of several interrelated activities such as hardware or software procurement, configuration, tuning, staging, installation, and interoperability testing.
- Disaster recovery
- A set of policies, tools, and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery focuses on the Information Technology (IT) systems, which support critical business functions.
- Dynamic survivorship
- The process of verifying that an aggregated record captures desired data from duplicate records. Reltio's unified entity profile is a logical representation of all the data from the contributing sources. The flexible and efficient schema-on-read capabilities in Reltio provide the ability to apply multiple dynamic survivorship strategies in parallel when retrieving data in Reltio, both in real-time and batch mode. This allows users to create multiple best versions of truth based to support downstream consumption by various departments or functions with zero maintenance overhead or recalculation processes.
E
- Early Access (EA) features
- A limited release of features only to a select set of interested customers and partners who commit to participating in a program where they deploy and adopt a new feature and provide feedback. Such features meet specific success criteria before they get formally included as General Availability (GA) features in a major release. The Early Access program enables us get early feedback from customers, so we can improve the feature functionality, documentation, and logistics such as pricing, infrastructure requirements, and scaling parameters. The documentation identifies features in the Early Access program. If you see an EA feature that sparks your interest, open a support ticket requesting access to the EA program.
- Entity
- A record for a singular, identifiable, and separate data object. An entity is based on an entity type that defines the characteristics that distinguish this category of data. For example:
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Sally Spring is a specific entity based on the Individual entity type. Her data record contains values for attributes such as her title (Ms), first name (Sally), middle initial (S), and last name (Spring).
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Superior Seed Sellers is a specific entity based on the Organization type. Its data record contains values for its company name (Superior Seed Sellers), company type, and financial identifiers.
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Sunflower seed packet is a specific product based on the Product entity type. Its data record contains values for attributes such as product type (product_seed), product name (sss-sunflower-120), product description (pack of 120 giant sunflower seeds toplant), country of origin (USA), and price ($12).
You view and manage entities in the Hub. You create and manage entity types, part of the Reltio data model, in the Console.
-
- Entity graph
- A visualization of the relationships between entities in a profile that enables you to model multi-node directed and non-directed relationships between entity types. The entity graph can be used to not just model individual entities, but to manage real-world connections and manage structured hierarchies and uncover insights from these.
- Entity resolution
- The process of identifying and linking similar records from one or more data sources to create an unified entity profile. Reltio uses the combination of predictable machine learning-powered algorithms to provide dynamic real-time entity resolution capabilities. Reltio's Entity Resolution can be used to match any type of entity including profiles for People, Organizations, Production, Location or any other custom entity that is configured in the Reltio Data Cloud.
- Entity type
- A template defining the attributes (characteristics) that distinguish this category of data. For example:
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An Individual entity type defines a data record for a person, such as a client, customer, employee, member, patient, or provider. It contains attributes to identify the person such as name, postal address, email address, account ID, position.
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An Organization entity type defines a data record for a group formed for a particular purpose, such as a government department, or financial, healthcare, or insurance institution. It contains attributes to identify the organization, such as name, facility type, and legal entity type.
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A Product entity type defines a data record for a commercial product. It contains attributes to identify the item for sale, such as brand, product type, product name, product description, country of origin, availability, and SKU.
Entity types are part of the Reltio data model, which you create and manage in the Console. You view and manage entities (specific instances of a given entity type uploaded from your source data) in the Hub.
-
- Environment
- A logical grouping of infrastructure components used to deliver Reltio services to end users. Some examples include Dev, Test, Prod, and EU Prod.
G
- General Availability (GA)
- A major release of the Reltio Data Cloud, introducing significant new features and enhancements. We deliver three major releases a year in February, June, and October.
- Graph database
- A graph database is a type of NoSQL or non-relational database, which is suitable for very large sets of distributed data. Instead of using tables like relational databases, a graph database uses graph structures for semantic queries with nodes, properties, and edges in order to represent and store data.
H
- Hosted software
- Software that is installed, managed, and accessed entirely from a remote server or location. It is hosted and managed by the software manufacturer or a third-party vendor. Users can access it globally through the Internet. Hosted software is also known as Software as a Service (SaaS), a cloud computing service model.
I
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- A cloud-native computing model that provides on-demand access to virtualized computing resources such as servers, storage, and networking, without the need for installation.
L
- Latency
- The time delay for data to travel between the sender of the data and the receiver of the data. A low latency value means that the time taken during data transmission is low.
M
- Machine Learning (ML)
- A sub field of AI that provides systems the ability to imitate human intelligence for learning and improving from experience. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and use algorithms and statistical models to analyze and draw inferences from data patterns rather than being explicitly programmed.
- Multi-token support
- The ability to generate a new access token every time a user or a service account makes a token request, even if active access tokens have already been issued against the same user/service account credentials. Reltio uses this to grant machine-to-machine requests or authentication requests from APIs.
N
- Noisy Neighbor
- A virtual machine (VM) or co-tenant in a shared cloud computing infrastructure whose resource usage on a neighboring core negatively impacts other VMs co-tenants on on the same physical host. For example, cache contamination may lead to performance degradation of the VMs in the same physical host.
- NoSQL
- A non-tabular database that stores data in different ways than a relational database, for example, columnar stores, graph stores, and document stores. Reltio stores primary data in NoSQL databases.
O
- OpenID Connect
- OpenID Connect (OIDC) is a simple identity protocol and open standard that is built using the OAuth 2.0 protocol. It enables client applications to rely on authentication that is performed by an OpenID Connect Provider (OP) to verify the identity of a user.
P
- Performance
- Performance refers to application performance, which in the context of cloud computing is the measurement of the performance and availability of applications in a production environment. It is mainly used with remote and cloud computing applications that are run in remote servers and served over a network. Application performance is a good indicator of the level of service that a provider is offering and is one of the top monitored IT metrics.
- Platform as a Service
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a service model in the cloud, where a user can access third-party hardware and software tools without configuring or installing software.
- Pod
- The grouping of the infrastructure needed to deliver services for a specific Reltio tenant.
- Private Cloud
- Tucked safely away behind the enterprise firewall, a private cloud provides large businesses with more control over their data and processes than public cloud computing. Private cloud is mostly used for PaaS and IaaS projects, providing developers with access to the required computing power.
- Product
- A packaged set of capabilities and configurations using the Reltio platform that is offered and sold to customers, often for a price. For example, Reltio Identity 360.
- Progressive Stitching
- This refers to the ability to start small with limited attribution or a smaller number of data sources, and iteratively add an increasing set of attributes, relationships, interactions, and transactions to create a comprehensive 360 profile. These responsive data management capabilities allow you to continuously refine the profiles in the Reltio Data Cloud.
R
- Redundancy
- Redundancy is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the form of a backup or fail-safe, or to improve the actual system performance.
- Reference Data Management
- Reference Data Management (RDM) data is used to define and maintain reference data. Typically, they are static or slowly changing over time. RDM curates reference data to ensure its quality, fitness for purpose, and consistency across business processes or applications.
- Reltio Console
- The Reltio user interface is used for administration and configuration activities. It provides a collection of applications, which allow you to configure, manage, and secure your data within the Reltio Data Cloud.
- Reltio Storage Unit
- The Reltio Storage Unit (RSU) is calculated as the combined total storage size across all primary and secondary storage spaces (including History, Activity Log, Match, Search Index, and Interactions). 1 RSU equates to 1 TB of storage usage. Current RSU usage for a tenant, including the breakdown of categories, can be found in the Tenant Management application of the Console.
- Recovery Point Objective
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable age of the data that can be restored (or recovery point) and the version of data lost.RPO can be thought of as the time between the time of data loss and the last useful backup of a known good state.
- Recovery Time Objective
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable length of time required for an organization to recover lost data and start using it.
S
- Scalability
- Scalability is an attribute that describes the ability of a process, network, software or organization to grow and manage increased demand. A system, business or software that is described as scalable has an advantage because it is more adaptable to the changing needs or demands of its users or clients.
- Scrum
- An agile development methodology centered around short development cycles called Sprints. The separation of development into multiple short cycles allows frequent changes to prioritization and more visibility into the velocity at which a team delivers new functionality to create predictability.
- Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0
- Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML) is an open federation standard that allows an Identity Provider (IdP) to authenticate users and pass identity and security information about them to a Service Provider (SP), typically an application or service. With SAML, you can enable a single sign-on experience for your users across many SAML-enabled applications and services.
- Single Sign-On
- Single Sign-On (SSO) is an authentication method that enables you to use a single set of credentials to securely authenticate across multiple applications and websites.
- Software as a Service
- Software as a Service (SaaS) refers to using a software program over the Internet, maintained by a SaaS company responsible for its creation and maintenance. The payment for use is periodic, and the concept is: you do not buy, you rent.
T
- Tenant
- An application instance or a group of users who share access. The tenants (application instances) can either be representations of organizations that have access to the multitenant application, or multiple applications that are competing for shared underlying resources offered on a common cloud environment.
U
- Universal ID
- Reltio generates and maintains a universal ID for all the unified entity profiles. The universal ID is durable and always resolves to the surviving unified entity profile. Even as the profiles in Reltio go through several iterations of entity resolution, the universal ID can be used to easily identify, retrieve, or update the unified entity profile. It can be distributed to downstream systems for the purpose of integration and unified reporting.
- Upgrade
- An upgrade is an updated version of existing hardware, software, or firmware, and is usually sold at a reduced price with a full version. Free upgrades may be included with the original purchase. The purpose of an upgrade is to introduce updated and improved product features, including performance, product life, usefulness, and convenience.