Glossary

Canonical Model

The single vocabulary of business nouns and verbs that every connected system is translated into, and back out of.

A canonical model is the agreement about what a customer, an order, or an invoice is. Each system keeps its own field names. The model is what those fields mean, so a cust_ref in one system and an account.external_id in another are the same customer.

Ngentix translates every system into this vocabulary and back out again. Pairs are not pre-built. Shopify to NetSuite and Shopify to HubSpot are the same work, because both are translations into the model, not a map someone wrote for that pair.

This is the layer an iPaaS leaves to the customer’s integration team. It is also what an agent needs: a noun it can act on, rather than a payload whose fields disagree across systems.

Read next.

Unified Data Model (UDM) A canonical schema of business entities and operations that lets the platform understand the meaning of the data it moves. /glossary/universal-data-model
Managed Data Flow A business event carried between two systems, translated into one canonical meaning, and kept correct as those systems change. /glossary/managed-data-flow
Flow One thing a business does, carried between two systems and kept true. /glossary/flow
Schema Inference Automatically determining the shape and types of a system’s data by introspecting its live responses. /glossary/schema-inference

All terms · The analyses these terms come from