Model Once, Represent Everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix

Folks,

I'm excited to finally share more about Netflix’s motivation for joining
this group. Today, we’ve introduced UDA (Unified Data Architecture) [1] to
the public:

[1] https://netflixtechblog.com/uda-unified-data-architecture-6a6aee261d8d

> UDA (Unified Data Architecture) is the foundation for connected data in
Content Engineering at Netflix. It enables teams to model domains once and
represent them consistently across systems — powering automation,
discoverability, and semantic interoperability.

This post introduces the foundations of UDA as a knowledge graph,
connecting domain models to data containers through mappings, and is
grounded in a metamodel we call Upper (short for "upper ontology") which
may be of particular interest to this group.

Upper is a self-referential, self-describing, and self-validating modeling
language built on top of SHACL. It extends SHACL’s expressivity for domain
modeling and introduces additional constraints that support strong typing,
projections, and introspection. In our architecture, every
upper:DomainModel is, by design, also a SHACL ontology.

We see Upper as a SHACL profile, and equally as a profile of RDF. Any
conceptual RDF can be described, as long as it is governed by a domain
model defined in Upper.

Beyond modeling, UDA also productionalizes RDF:

* Every piece of data is stored in a Named Graphs, each conforming to a
governing model and owned by a team.
* Upper itself is part of the bootstrapping set of domain models, alongside
formalizations of RDF, RDFS, OWL, SHACL, and XSD.
* Our internal partners have contributed axiomatizations of SKOS and DCAT
using Upper, introduced in the post as well.
* We also introduce the notion of composable universes, where Named Graphs
resolve into Governed Graphs via follow-your-nose import predicates
declared in governing models.

We’ll be sharing more technical details on Upper in the coming weeks. In
the meantime, I’d be happy to answer any questions.

Best,
Alexandre Bertails