Collibra building blocks

To create an unbeatable data governance model, it's important to understand the basic building blocks of Collibra Data Intelligence Platform and how they are related.

The following table lists Collibra concepts and explains how Collibra captures information.

Concept	Description
Community	A community is a grouping of subcommunities and domains. It often corresponds to functional divisions in a company and works best if it is aligned with the company's governance organization.
Domain type	A domain type defines the semantics of a domain, similar to a template. It defines which assets types users can create in the domain.
Domain	A domain is a logical grouping of assets and belongs to only one community. It has only one domain type that specifies which asset types can be created in the domain. A domain has a unique name within its community.
Scope	A scope is a selection of communities and domains that you can assign to one or more asset types. In a scope, you can define amongst others a domain type, attribute types and relation types.
Asset type	An asset type defines the semantics of an asset, as a kind of template. It defines which attribute types and relation types the asset can have. Scopes are assigned to asset types.
Asset	An asset is the fundamental building block or resource for which you want to capture information. An asset belongs to exactly one domain and has a unique name within that domain. An asset is the instance of exactly one asset type.
Attribute type	An attribute type defines the class of information that an attribute contains. It is assigned to an asset type through a scope.
Attribute	An attribute is a specific piece of information that captures information about an asset. One asset can contain many attributes.
Relation type	A relation type specifies the type of relation between two asset types. A relation type is bidirectional, going from a head asset type to a tail asset type and the other way around.
Relation	A relation is a link between exactly two assets. It captures how two assets are related to each other. One asset can have many relations. A relation is the instance of exactly one relation type.
Complex relation type	A complex relation type specifies the characteristics of a complex relation instance. A complex relation is a type of relation that helps you to create many-to-many relations, as well as capture attributes (description, priority, ...) on top of the many-to-many relation. They can be regarded as 'objectified associations'. A complex relation type is specified by its name, description, a collection of relation types and a collection of attribute types.

The following diagram explains how the concepts from the table are related to each other.