Data Marts

Data will be replicated from the ODGA’s data warehouses to data marts with the appropriate permissions and specific data elements as defined by the individual agency's data trust agreements. During the replication process all personally identifiable (PII) data will be masked and any sensitive data will be excluded unless stated in the requesting agency's user agreements. Permissions on the data marts will largely be read-only access of the agency data that has been formatted in a way to fit the individual user’s requirements. ODGA leverages AAD (Azure Active Directory) to manage users and groups and what data they are allowed to access. Data marts will be the primary form of data retrieval from the ODGA. These data marts will be accessed in many different ways by users or systems such as:

Researchers
Data Sharing
Machine Learning and AI
Reporting
Virginia Open Data Portal

Researchers

Data marts will be created to allow researchers to pull data sets to be used in their work. One example of this would be a university needing access to COVID-19 or medical data for research or analysis.

Data Sharing

Data marts will be used for data sharing across agencies or organizations. One example of this would be implementing a data mart that supplies backend data for an agency's API(s) for user verification, analytics, etc.

Machine Learning and AI

Data from the data marts can be loaded into analytics services where machine learning and AI processes can be applied to the data sets. Since the ODGA is a full Azure infrastructure, Synapse Analytics will be available to use as well as other predictive analytics tools.

Reporting

Many reports will be built off of the data sets loaded into the data marts. The ODGA’s primary reporting tool is Power BI, but many other reporting tools can be used to retrieve data from the data marts. The ODGA has the capability to develop custom reporting as a service or an agency can develop their own custom reports that retrieve data from the data marts that the ODGA can deploy on their behalf.

Virginia Open Data Portal

The Virginia Open Data Portal is just one example of an application that is retrieving its data from a data mart. The Virginia Open Data Portal allows users to access Commonwealth of Virginia data in order to interpret, analyze, and transform the data into actionable intelligence. Within the portal, you can view stories and dashboards, create visualizations, filter data, and access it via APIs to build solutions in web and mobile applications.