What Does an Event Mean? Manage the Meaning of Your Data!

Van Oord, a 150 year old family owned business, build windmill parks in the sea, lay cables on sea surface, dredging, as well as infrastructure (Dike, etc) operates world-wide, often facilitating self-owned specialized vessels. A well-known prestigious project is the creation of the palm island at the coast of Dubai. Data Management in Van Oord is still in its infancy. The current operation is based on bilateral data exchange, without an Enterprise Service Bus or mayor data warehouse infrastructure. In 2020 Van Oord started a PoC with Confluent Kafka, executing a wide range of uses cases and requirements, followed by the formal program implementing a sustainable data platform. Data owners are publishing an information product, i.e. a set of Kafka topics to communicate change (a la CDC) and topics for sharing state of a data source (Kafka tables). The information product owner is responsible for granting access, assuring data quality, data linage and governance. The set of all information products forms the enterprise data model. This talk outlines why Van Oord requires data governance and enterprise architecture models integrated with Confluent Kafka, and demo how an open-source based data governance tool is integrated with Confluent Kafka to fulfil these requirements.