Entity Relationships

The Relationships page at /mdm/relationship-graph is the visualisation layer for relationships between MDM entities — "this customer owns these accounts which are managed by these reps and contain these products".

Why relationships

Master data isn't just isolated entities; it's a graph. A customer with 5 accounts, 12 products, and 3 service reps assigned. Relationships encode that structure so reports, AI prompts, and data products can reason over it.

Relationship types

Built-in relationship types:

Type	Direction	Example
owns	A → B	Customer owns Account
manages	A → B	Account Manager manages Customer
belongs_to	A → B	Account belongs to Household
parent_of	A → B	Org parent of suborg
successor_of	A → B	New entity supersedes old (post-merge)

You can define custom relationship types in clxs.yaml under mdm.relationship_types.

Graph visualisation

Pick a starting entity (or filter to a subset). The graph renders nodes (entities) and edges (relationships) with:

• Node colour — entity type
• Edge label — relationship type
• Hover — show entity attributes / relationship metadata
• Click node — re-centre on it
• Zoom / pan / reset

Filter by relationship type, depth (1–5 hops), and entity status.

Authoring relationships

Two ways:

• From sources — derive relationships from FK columns in source tables (configured in MDM ingest)
• Manual — steward action: pick two entities, choose type, save

Relationship audit

Every relationship has:

• source_entity_id, target_entity_id, type
• created_by, created_at
• confidence — for derived relationships
• valid_from / valid_to — for time-bound relationships (e.g. a manager assignment that ended)

Hierarchies

Specialised relationships forming trees (org chart, geographic regions, product categories) are managed on Hierarchies. The relationship-graph view shows hierarchy edges alongside other relationship types.

API

GET   /mdm/relationships?entity_id=...&depth=2
POST  /mdm/relationships
DELETE /mdm/relationships/{id}
GET   /mdm/relationships/types

Related

• Hierarchies — tree-shaped relationships
• Cross-Domain — relationships across entity types
• Golden Records — endpoints of every relationship