Relationship types

Relationships enable organizations to model, manage, and govern semantic connections between business entities. Clearly defined relationships between business entities unlock richer analytics, enable automation, and ensure data integrity. They help organizations turn complex connections into actionable insights and smarter decisions.

Defining relationships in your ontology enables these key benefits:

• Semantic clarity: By explicitly defining relationships (such as owns, located at, supplies, or monitored by), organizations can understand not just what entities exist, but how they interact.
• Analytics: Ontologies that are enriched with relationships offer deeper 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 tenant.
• An ontology (preview) item with entity types created.
• Relationship source data that is prepared according to 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.

• Entity type: An abstract representation of a business object (like Vehicle or Sensor). It defines a logical model of an item.

• Relationship type: A definition that specifies how two entity types are connected (such as located_at or monitored_by).

  Tip

  You can define a relationship type without binding data to it. If you don't bind data, the relationship type isn't visualized in the preview experience.

• Relationship instance: A specific occurrence of a relationship type between two entity instances.

How-to steps

This section contains step-by-step instructions for adding and managing relationship types.

Create relationship type

The first step in adding a relationship is creating a relationship type. Then, bind data to the relationship type to create relationship instances.

For example, say 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. Start by selecting Add relationship type in the menu ribbon. Or, highlight an entity type in the Entity Types pane and select ..., then Add relationship type.

   

   

2. In the Add relationship type to ontology window that appears,

   1. Define the relationship type with a Relationship type name.
   2. Select the Source entity type and Target entity type for your relationship. The source and target entity types must be distinct from one another.

   

   Select Add relationship type.

3. The Relationship configuration pane opens. In this pane, you define the columns from the source data that are used to relate instances of these entity types.

4. Under Source data, select your workspace, lakehouse, and table that contains the keys for both your target and source entity type.

5. For each entity type, select a Source column from the linking source data that identifies instances of that entity type. The source column selections must match the entity type keys.

   

   Tip

   If you don't see any keys for an entity type, make sure your source and target entity types have keys defined.

6. Select Create.

Edit or delete relationship type

You can edit or delete relationship types in the Relationship configuration pane.

• To edit a relationship type, select it in the canvas and edit any of the fields in the Relationship configuration pane.

  Note

  Due to a known issue, it's currently not recommended to change the source or target entity type on a relationship that has already been bound to data. If you need to change the source or target entity type on a relationship that's connected to a data source, delete the relationship and recreate it with the right entity types.

• To delete a relationship type, select it in the canvas and select the Delete relationship type button in the Relationship configuration pane.