Identifying the data to be ingested

Usually, when you start thinking about adding data from an external source into the Information Store, an i2 Analyze deployment is already in place. That deployment necessarily has an i2 Analyze schema that defines all of the entity types, link types, and property types that data in the system can have. Before you go any further, you must have a clear idea of how your data becomes i2 Analyze entity records and link records in the Information Store.

It is unlikely that the data in your external source has a one-to-one mapping with the entity types and link types in the i2 Analyze schema:

• Probably, your source does not contain data for all the entity types in the schema. As a result, you do not usually need to create a staging table for every possible entity type.
• The schema can define link types that connect several different entity types. In that case, each entity-link-entity type combination for which your source contains data requires a separate staging table.

For example, imagine an i2 Analyze schema that defines the entity types "Person", "Vehicle", and "Account", and the link type "Access to". In this situation, you might decide to create a staging table for each of the entity types. However, the data requires two staging tables for "Access to" links: one for links between people and vehicles, and the other for links between people and accounts.