Roadmaps, Not Pipelines — Business‑Friendly Mapping from Sources to Targets

Turn your source‑to‑target mappings into living diagrams — automatically.

Summary

Treat mappings as data. Generate draw.io diagrams from metadata so business and engineering see the same story.

Use a roadmap metaphor: roads (flows), stops (transformations), start/destination cities (source/target).

Keep it vendor‑neutral but compatible with tools like draw.io/VSCode, dbt, OpenMetadata, and frameworks such as CrossBreeze.

Optionally export SVG and add light animation for presentations and Confluence pages.

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Why this matters (and how it fits our series)

In our work on Business‑Friendly Mapping and Model‑Driven Data Engineering, we’ve argued that the fastest way to align teams is to make the model the product and the metadata the single source of truth. This article shows a pragmatic pattern: take the mappings you already maintain and render them as readable, navigable roadmaps — automatically.

This extends themes from:

• From Coding to Modeling: The Rise of Model‑Driven Data…