Oracle BI Applications uses the ODI reverse engineering process to populate the repository with metadata from the source system. RKMs retrieve metadata from data storage and load it into the repository.
For example, RKMs detects the description of tables, columns, data types, constraints, and comments from a database to load the repository. RKMs support various technologies, such as databases, XML files, and various types of flat files. You can also use RKMs to retrieve non-standard metadata from databases or applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft, and so on.
The RKM role is to perform customized reverse engineering for a model. The RKM handles connecting to the application or metadata provider then transforming and writing the resulting metadata into the ODI repository. The metadata is written into temporary tables, and then the RKM calls the ODI API to read from these tables and write to the ODI metadata tables of the Work repository in incremental update mode.
Note that the Oracle BI Applications ODI repository contains the relevant source data models. Therefore, you would need to run an RKM only if you have customized tables in the source system and want to import these changes to the ODI repository. For more information about customizing tables and tasks, see Customizing the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse.