Disclosed herein is a process that involves retrieving a data model for a data source, establishing at least one filter operation or at least one clean operation that modifies an aspect of the retrieved data model, onboarding underlying data from the data source while applying the established at least one filter operation or at least one clean operation, defining at least one transformation operation to apply to a portion of the underlying data that has been onboarded, and applying the at least one transformation operation to the portion of the underlying data to thereby assign the data to a semantic network, the semantic network comprising conceptual data components and associative data components.