In metadata management, we often talk about business glossaries and data dictionaries. What is the difference and what is the relationship between these?

If we look at dictionary definitions we see that a dictionary is a work in which words and terms are defined and listed in alphabetical order.

A glossary is a mini-dictionary – in effect an alphabetical listing of terms related to a specific subject e.g. a sporting glossary or a business glossary

1. What is a business glossary?
2. What is a data dictionary?
3. What is the relationship?
4. How do I use this?
5. How does Stewardship work?

What is a business glossary?

For data to be meaningful, its context needs to be clear.

Sounds easy, but rarely do people across the enterprise share a common understanding of even basic business terms like “customer” or “product.” And even if they do today, those meanings change over time.

A Business Glossary defines terms across a business domain, providing an authoritative source for all business operations, including its Database Systems.

It helps stakeholders across your organization collaboratively agree on the definitions, rules, and policies that define your data and manage reviews and approvals.

And it makes this information easily accessible to every data citizen for faster adoption.

What is a data dictionary?

A data dictionary is a collection of descriptions of the data objects or items in a data model for the benefit of programmers and others who need to refer to them.

It describes the structure of a piece of data, its relationship to other data, and its origin, format, and use.

The Data Dictionary serves as a searchable repository for people who need to understand how and where data is stored and how it can be consumed.

With it, you can also document roles and responsibilities and launch appropriate workflows to define, describe, and map data.

What is the relationship?

Business terms provide context and meaning to the data dictionary.

A technical field represents or instantiates business terms.

For example, we may have a business term “Date of Birth” which is defined as “The date on which the party was born as per their birth certificate”.

Date of birth may be represented in a CRM system in the schema “Contact” with the field name “dob” and stored as a date field.

In the Finance System, date of birth may be stored in the schema “CustomFields” stored in “CustomAttr1” with the format “text.”

Business Term	Definition	CRM	Finance
Date of Birth	The date on which the party was born as per their birth certificate	contact.dob	CustomFields.CustomAttr1

In practice, not every business term will have a technical representation. “Birth Certificate” (from the example above) may be defined for clarity, but may not be represented in my data model. However, most business terms may have many technical representations across different systems and reports.

How do I use this?

Let’s assume, for example, that I need to do an Age analysis of my customers.

I can define Customer Age as being “the current date minus the customer’s date of birth.”

As a business user, this allows me to define my requirement in plain language, without being tied to the underlying data complexities.

The relationship above allows me to find the different representations accessible in different systems – even when the field names are not clear (such as CustomAttr1 in the example).

In many off-the-shelf applications underlying field names may not be meaningful, or, in some cases, fields may no longer be used for their original purpose.

Accessing the dictionary would allow the technical programmers to identify that CustomAttr1 must be converted to a date before the calculation can be completed.

Read our post on the benefits of a business glossary for more examples.

How does Stewardship work?

Separating my business glossary from my data dictionaries means that I can assign different stewards for business and technical terms. Using an enterprise data governance platform, like Data360, allows one to easily separate these entities while maintaining the relationships between them.

Governance and stewardship should seek to ensure that critical information is captured, that technical and business responsibilities are clear, and that relevant relationships between business and technical assets are captured.

The post From business glossary to business authority has more on this topic