Data and Information Inventory and Attributes

Data Stores physically house instances of Data and Information types. The Data Stores Inventory (not yet published — refer to the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices document) will govern the physical containers — databases, object stores, file systems, data warehouses, data lakes — that contain instances of the types governed by this inventory.

The connecting attributes are Housing Data Stores (which lists all Data Stores containing instances of a given type) and Source of Truth Store (which identifies the single master copy Data Store) in the Relationship Attributes category of this inventory. These two attributes are manually populated at Walk maturity and automatically derived at Run maturity when the Data Stores Inventory is published and connected.

When established, this relationship enables physical data distribution analysis: how many data stores hold copies of a given type? Is the Source of Truth Store in a jurisdiction with data residency requirements? Which data stores would require migration if a data type’s definition changes? These questions are essential for data architecture governance and cannot be answered from the logical layer alone.