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Overview

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The term Common Data Model describes at least five related capabilities or ideas:

Capability Details
A way to describe the location and shape of data records that are stored in files.
  • This is also called a Common Data Model folder, because the data files are often grouped together in a data lake folder or a hierarchy of folders.
  • An organizing document called a manifest acts as the entry point for a collection of entity schema definitions and data partition locations.
A collection of reference entities that have been published on GitHub to represent the most common shapes of data that customers may find in the business application ecosystem. The collection includes:
  • Base entities for Dataverse.
  • Entities for Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Marketing.
  • Industry-specific accelerator extensions to Dataverse.
  • Analytic data from other services.
The metadata used to describe the logical concepts, compositions, and semantic meanings for, and relationships between, standard published entities or a customer's private standards or ad-hoc compositions. The metadata includes:
  • Logical classes of entities, with inheritance and containment.
  • An extensible way to create rich, complex data types and to describe the semantic meaning and other metadata for entities and their attributes.
  • A set of shared semantic meaning indicators for many business types and needs, such as:
    • First name, email address, fiscal calendar parts, distance in meters, and more.
    • Estimates, probabilities, occurrence date, and base currency.
An object model library. The object library:
  • Reads, manages, and creates the Common Data Model folder metadata files.
  • Creates comprehensible logical descriptions and semantic meanings for standard or custom entities.
  • Generates a Common Data Model folder document and concrete entity metadata by using standard or custom entity schemas as a guide.
The ecosystem of applications and services. The ecosystem makes use of some or all of the four capabilities to help app developers work cooperatively on standardized entity shapes or share metadata.

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