A Project represents the complete logical task that one wants to accomplish. It is used to record information that affects the entire process. Many Projects may be defined per Rulebase and each Project may contain many clusterings.

An Identity Table (IDT) is a DCE table stored in the database containing denormalized and transformed data. It is created by extracting data from either database tables (User Source Tables) or a sequential (flat) file.

An Identity Index (IDX) is an index stored in the database containing keys for each row of the IDT. It may optionally store additional matching data (Key-Data) together with each key in order to improve clustering performance.

A clustering defines the application objectives and business rules for a single clustering process. It will define the search and matching rules to be used.

The clustering also defines which DCE utilities are used to create the clustering result. This is done by associating jobs with a clustering.

A job represents a unit of work performed by the DCE. For example it might be the process of converting the input file, loading it into the database, or clustering the records on the database.

A job entity is used to specify information that is particular to a job. If the job accesses an input or output file, the job will refer to a logical-file entity.

A logical-file entity is used to specify how the DCE will access a physical file. It describes the path to the file, the file format, and the view to be used when accessing the file.

A view specifies the layout of a record and the rules for constructing and using that record. A view definition controls what information is loaded to - or extracted from - the database.