Adobe Takes Open-Source Approach to Experience Data Model

Today’s businesses are interacting with their customers over multiple channels across the web, mobile devices, in-store and IoT. We call all the data generated through these interactions “experience data”. Traditionally, experience data has been captured in a variety of systems ranging from transactional databases to data warehouses to data lakes.

In order for businesses to attract, convert, retain, engage and deliver compelling experience to their customers, it is critical to gain insights from experience data. This data enables businesses to stitch a customer journey across all the channels of interaction. Stitching this data is challenging and very time consuming because the data is noisy, high in volume and siloed across disparate data sources in diverse formats. In addition, the data needs to be stitched together in a holistic manner and in real time to determine the next best action across all phases of customer journey.

Companies are spending an incredible amount of time in labor intensive tasks to cleanse, join, organize, normalize and understand the data. As a result, the opportunity to gain insights from experience data is lost, negatively impacting the customer experience.

There is a need for a common language that helps understand, organize, integrate and exchange experience data, enabling applications to interoperate.

Adobe has taken meaningful steps to help companies understand complex experience data. Across Adobe Experience Platform, formerly known as Adobe Cloud Platform, we have created a data dictionary of experience data. The dictionary helps describe the experience data by following a consistent naming and definition of its attributes. We have also created schemas to organize experience data, what we call Adobe Experience Data Models (XDM).

XDMs are purpose-built for the Experience Business, empowering organizations to deliver relevant data-driven experiences in a matter of milliseconds. XDM describes and harmonizes behavioral data harnessed from experiences across every touch point — from the web to social media to AR and VR — to precisely target customers. Technologies that derive insights only from transactional data will not be able to deliver the level of individualized personalization Adobe Experience Platform offers.

Today, we’re excited to highlight the open-source approach we’re taking with our XDMs to give data scientists the speed and flexibility they need to deliver personalized experiences.

XDM for the Experience Era Platform

XDM removes the barriers for data to move from any source into Adobe Experience Platform and become automatically actionable. We’ve created a set of over 50 XDM semantic schemas that cover end-to-end customer experiences. These schemas, such as customer profile, segment, event, campaign, product and order, help give meaning to the data that’s being inputted in Adobe Experience Platform. To ensure that XDMs can be used and customized by anyone, we’ve followed the spirit of open source and made these schemas available on GitHub, licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 license, to ensure XDM functions as a true industry standard.

XDM is described in human-readable format, JSON, which is an open standards file format. Opening up XDMs makes it the common language for data integration and interchange across applications, and systems of record. It enables the exchange of experience and transactional data across disparate data sources. XDMs are extensible to meet unique and evolving business requirements.

Enterprises, through Adobe Experience Platform and XDM, can collect, curate, organize and standardize every touch point event as experience data. They can then leverage the data organized in XDMs for data science, business intelligence and building decisioning applications for real-time delivery of compelling experiences.

An open-source approach to XDM enables enterprises to understand data faster; extend the data for their custom needs; and rapidly exchange data between systems, applications and warehouses.

Breaking down big data barriers with Experience Query Service

XDM accelerates the time to uncover answers to data engineers’ questions through Adobe’s new Experience Query Service, which is a petabyte scale service built on open source big data technology. It uses the XDM to run “what if” scenarios, against the information in Adobe Experience Platform, eliminating the manual and time-consuming process of cleansing and transforming petabytes of data. It is structured query language (SQL) ready to meet the industry standard for answering questions quickly.

If a marketer wants to run a campaign, for example, a data scientist or data engineer can quickly conduct an ad hoc analysishere.