Glossary

What is Canonical Transform?

Canonical transform is the function of changing a data format from an input data source to a standard data model, called the canonical schema. A canonical transform provides mapping from the source format to the standard model, creating a way to incorporate new data sources into an application using the standard data model without modifying the application. New sources are mapped to the canonical schema using the canonical transform, and the application continues using the canonical schema.

Why are Canonical Transforms Important?

Canonical transforms enable a model-driven architecture to simplify and accelerate the development of new applications. Applications can be developed to use the standard data model, while new data sources or extensions of existing data sources can be accommodated separately using canonical transformation to map to the standard data model. Application developers do not need to know the implementation details of the underlying data sources, and instead can focus on using the consistency of the standard data model to implement their business logic more quickly.

How C3 AI Enables Organizations to Use Canonical Transforms

C3 AI provides a complete, scalable, end-to-end platform based on a model-driven architecture – the C3 AI^® Platform – that takes full advantage of the benefits of canonical transforms to enable designing, developing, deploying, and operating enterprise AI applications at industrial scale. With the C3 AI Platform, organizations can accelerate development of enterprise AI applications on cloud platforms like AWS and Azure 25-fold and deploy them in one-tenth the time of other approaches. Because of C3 AI’s revolutionary model-driven architecture, applications developed with the C3 AI Platform can run on any cloud with little or no change to the application code.

C3 AI also delivers a portfolio of prebuilt, SaaS enterprise AI applications for a growing number of use cases such as C3 AI Reliability, C3 AI Inventory Optimization, C3 AI Fraud Detection, and C3 AI Anti-Money Laundering. Some of the world’s largest organizations – including Shell, the US Department of Defense, and Koch Industries – use C3 AI technology to drive digital transformation initiatives that significantly reduce costs, increase asset availability and reliability, improve human safety, and enhance customer satisfaction. These applications run out of the box on the leading cloud platforms. A C3 AI application can be configured to take advantage of microservices available from different cloud providers – for example, AWS’s image recognition can be combined with Google’s natural language processing in the same application.