Relationship types in ontology (preview)

Relationships allow organizations to model, manage, and govern semantic connections between business entities. Clearly defined relationships help organizations turn complex connections into actionable insights and decisions with the following benefits:

• Semantic clarity: Explicitly defined relationships (such as owns, located at, supplies, or monitored by) allow organizations to represent not only what entities exist, but how they interact.
• Analytics: Ontologies that are enriched with relationships offer contextualized insights.

Prerequisites

Before adding relationship types to your ontology, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

• A Fabric workspace with a Microsoft Fabric-enabled capacity.
• Ontology item (preview) enabled on your Fabric tenant.
• An ontology (preview) item with entity types created.
• Relationship source data that meets these guidelines:
  • The data is in OneLake.
  • The source data contains keys for both the source and target entity type.

Key concepts

Relationship types use the following ontology (preview) concepts. For definitions of these terms, see the Ontology (preview) glossary.

• Entity type
• Relationship type
• Relationship instance

Create relationship type

The first step in adding a relationship in your ontology (preview) item is creating a relationship type. Then, bind data to the relationship type to create relationship instances.

For example, suppose you want to define a relationship between the entity types Truck and Driver, and your data contains a table called Truck data with columns TruckId, Site, TruckName, and DriverId. You might start by defining a relationship type called drives from the Driver entity type to the Truck entity type. Then, create a data binding based on the Truck data table, using the columns TruckId and DriverId to define relationship instances for that relationship type. The result is that your drives relationship type has instances to represent each combination of TruckId and DriverId in your data.

Follow these steps to create a relationship type and bind data to it:

1. In the Home configuration canvas, there are multiple ways to create a relationship type. Select Add relationship from the top ribbon, select ... > Add relationship next to the name of an entity type in the Explorer, or select ... > Add relationship type on an entity type card in the main canvas.

   

2. The Add new relationship window appears. Enter the Relationship type name, the Origin entity type, and the Target entity type. Select Create.

   

3. The relationship type is created and appears in the configuration canvas. Select it on the canvas to open the relationship details configuration.

   

4. Observe the sections of the configuration page:

   • Origin entity type: Lists details of the origin entity.
   • Relationship type: Sets details of the relationship type.
   • Target entity type: Lists details of the target entity.

   

5. In the middle panel, enter the relationship type details.

   1. Mapping table: Expand Browse available sources and choose the table in the source data that can link the two entity types together. This table should contain identifying information for both entity types within each row (such as columns for a store ID and a freezer ID).
   2. Matched ... (origin entity type): This setting specifies the column in the relationship source data table whose values match the key property defined on the origin entity type. The name may match or it may be different.
   3. Matched ... (target entity type): This setting specifies the column in the relationship source data table whose values match the key property defined on the target entity type. The name may match or it may be different.

6. Save the relationship type. Confirm that the relationship type updated successfully, then select Cancel to close the configuration options.

7. You see the Configure page for the entity, where the updated relationship is visible in the Relationships section.

   

Edit or delete relationship type

To edit or delete a relationship type, reopen its configuration page by selecting the relationship type in the canvas view (visible in both the Home configuration canvas and the Relationships section of the Configure page). On the Configure page, you can also select Manage relationships > {relationship type name}.

On this page, edit the relationship type configuration or delete the relationship type.