Introduction

imx (information management exchange) is a general-purpose unified data management and exchange utility (serving as content authoring and publishing platform). imx offers the following benefits to enterprises and individuals:

• ** Digital Assets Management ** : Assimilate, organise and serve valuable data in a discoverable and machine-consumable form. The data can be in varying types and forms: textual, structured, multimedia …etc. (this is also known as Unified Data Platform or Content Repository).
• ** Digital Presence ** : Publish content on the web (SEO friendly) and exchange messages/content with others (Notifications/Updates, Emails and Instant messages).
• ** Data Mastering ** : Promote the principles and practices of cleansing and enriching content to position it as the primary-source-of-truth. This also minimizes data-debt and helps transform the data into an asset as opposed to liability.
• ** Longevity ** : Maintain valuable data in a form that can be consumed for many years. Time-proofed data escapes the boundaries of technologies and applications; in such a way where the data could remain virtually the same while everything else can change on its own pace.
• ** True ownership of content ** : Genuine ownership of content; so content can be hosted and served anywhere.
• ** Federation and decentralization ** : Similar to classical Email self-hosting and interoperation; instances of imx are interoperate among themselve (aka Federation); Federation also offers torrent-like features to help scale the delivery of popular media content.
• ** Workflow and reactivity ** : Configurable reactive rules that specify the desired system reaction towards changes and actions.
• ** High performance coupled with small footprint ** : Being light-weight and performant is a key principle in the design and implementation of imx.

Isolating and maintaining golden data in an abstracted in a layer of its own has several advantages:

1. Easy to discover, harness and query across the data space.
2. Less effort and time to create and extend functionality / applications.
3. Easy to sync, backup, archive and migrate the golden data independently from the applications that interact with it. I.e. the data is no more locked by the applications.
4. Change history and logs can be reviewed throughout the data space.
5. One clean access-control configuration across the data space. Making it easier to review and update.
6. The data layer is provisioned (made available) through API that can evolve as needed. e.g. REST, JSON-API, GraphQL.

Borrowing the term from BigData, this data architecture delivers a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform.