Creating an ingestion mapping file

The mappings in an ingestion mapping file define how rows in staging tables become i2 Analyze records in the Information Store during the ingestion process. Each mapping that you write describes how to construct the origin identifiers for data of a particular type, and specifies the security dimension values that apply to records.

Before you create your ingestion mappings, review the information about origin identifiers and security dimension values in i2 Analyze.

The Information Store ingestion mechanism makes it possible for you to develop and extend your ingestion mappings over time. You can test your approach to ingestion by writing and using a single (entity type) mapping, and then adding more entity type and link type mappings later. You can put all your mappings in one file, or put each mapping in a separate file, or anything between those two extremes.

If you populated the staging tables successfully, then writing ingestion mappings can be straightforward. Eventually, you need a mapping for each staging table that you created, but you can approach the problem one mapping at a time.

  1. Choose a populated staging table for an entity type that has links to other entity records in the data model.
  2. Create an ingestion mapping file that contains an ingestion mapping for the staging table that you chose in step 1.
    If you prefer to start from an existing file, look at mapping.xml in the examples\data\law-enforcement-data-set-1 directory of the deployment toolkit.
  3. Run the ingestion command to validate the mapping.

    If you are unhappy with the outcome, edit the ingestion mapping and run the command again.

  4. Repeat all of the preceding steps for all the other staging tables that you populated.

The examples\data\law-enforcement-data-set-1 directory of the deployment toolkit contains an ingestion mapping file named mapping.xml. This file contains ingestion mappings for all the staging tables that the ingestion example creates. You can use mapping.xml as the basis for the ingestion mappings that you need for your data.