Sun公司启动了一个名叫Mural的开源社区来开发主数据管理方案Master Data Management (MDM)，基于开放标准和开放规格。根据Wikipedia的解释：MDM包括一套流程和工具，其中中央和持久定义非事物的组织实体entities，也被称为参考数据Reference data。MDM的目标是搜集和供应给各种流程和独特的实例每一个实体entity。

面向服务的架构SOA非常适合MDM解决方案。Mural,一个开放源代码社区围绕此想法来开发，使之管理数据，进行企业化生产。Mural是唯一的端到端，全功能的开放源代码的MDM解决方案。

下面是详细介绍：

Products

* Mural will continue to evolve with additional input from the community and is available in a commercial form with the Sun MDM Suite release scheduled for June (will also be part of Java CAPS R6 in June).
* Mural Preview is now available. It is directly downloadable from http://mural.dev.java.net.

Projects

* Master Index Studio: Provides the capability to create any domain-specific master index through the matching, de-duplication, merging, and cleansing of data from various data sources.
* Data Integrator: Provides extract-transform-load (ETL) and extract-load-transform (ELT) capability and supports a wide variety of data sources including relational as well as flat files, spreadsheets, XML, and newer sources such as HTML tables and RSS feeds.
* Data Quality: Features matching, standardization, normalization, profiling, and cleansing capabilities.
* Data Services: Provides server-side data mashup capabilities having multiple forms such as exposing data services for enterprise mashups and providing real-time views of information for master data customers.
* Data Migration: Provides the ability to migrate database objects across database instances and types.
* Mural builds upon the GlassFish, Open ESB, and NetBeans open-source communities.

Licenses

* Mural, GlassFishESB, GlassFish and NetBeans are free to download and free to deploy
* Mural projects are available under CDDL license from http://mural.dev.java.net
* Mural is available in a commercial product suite - Sun MDM Suite

Top Ten Things You Should Know About Mural

1. Enhanced customer experience. Helps customer retention, aids cross selling, delivers the right customer experience and manages the risk associated with them
2. Reduced cost and complexity. Maintain master data at a single location and execute transactions locally
3. Reduced errors. Master data represents accurate and consistent information
4. Increased visibility. Accurate report generation using master data as a source
5. Enhanced auditing and compliance. Data changes are accurately registered and available for reference
6. Open source. Mural is an open source community and is built to support Sun's complete open source stack - "Metal to Mural"
7. Reduced time to market. Encourages data level collaboration between organizational hierarchies
8. Single integrated toolset. Integrated toolset to extract data from source systems, clean, profile, match, and load master indexes
9. Size-to-fit integration solution. Since Open ESB leverages the JBI framework customers can easily assemble an integration solution to fit their specific requirements and integration environment.
10. Leverage GlassFish and NetBeans. Mural's components are built on and fully support GlassFish and all of the design time tooling is built on NetBeans