We touched on the basics of the MDS object model in Chapter 1, Master Data Management and Chapter 2, Master Data Services Overview, when covering core concepts such as entities, attributes, members, and collections. The full MDS object model contains these objects, as well as a number of objects that we've not covered yet. The full MDS object model can be summarized by the following diagram:

As indicated in the diagram, the Model object is the highest level object in the MDS object model. It represents an MDM subject area, such as Product or Customer. Therefore, it would be normal to have a model called Product, which would contain several different Entities, such as Color, Brand, Style, and an entity called Product itself.

As we know already from Chapter 1, entities have one or more Attributes and instances of entities are known as Members.

Instead of an entity just containing attributes, it is possible within MDS to categorize the attributes into groups, which...