How to Organize Business Glossaries in Your Organization
To streamline communication and enhance understanding within your organization, consider developing functional business glossaries. These glossaries can include terms frequently used across different departments. Here's how you can structure your business terms effectively:
Business Term Creation: You can define a business term within a specific domain and category for easy navigation and categorization. This hierarchical arrangement allows for better organization and retrieval of terms.
Placement Options: A term can be categorized under a domain, placed within a category under that domain, or established as a standalone term.
Unassigned Terms: In cases where a term is created without assigning it to a domain or category, it will be labeled as unassigned. This ensures that no term is left out, even if it's not yet categorized.
Organizing your business glossary with these methods can significantly aid in maintaining clarity and consistency across your organization.
Managing Business Glossaries in Pentaho Data Catalog
The Pentaho Data Catalog streamlines the process of managing your data environment through business glossaries, providing a unified platform for the creation, organization, curation, and identification of key glossary items such as domains, categories, and terms. This enables efficient navigation and access to the right data.
Role-Based Access and Permissions
Interaction with the business glossaries is governed by the roles and permissions assigned to users, ensuring secure and targeted access to data and metadata:
Business Steward: Users with this role have the capability to import/export/create/delete/update glossaries, allowing for the expansion and refinement of the business glossary structure.
Analyst: Users with this role can enrich glossaries by adding terms within categories and creating associations for existing terms in accessible glossaries. This role facilitates detailed and comprehensive glossary content development.
Leveraging the Business Glossary
The business glossary not only aids in efficient data navigation but also serves as a critical tool in role-based access control. This ensures that valuable data and metadata are secured, properly segmented, and prevented from reaching unintended recipients.
By effectively utilizing the Pentaho Data Catalog and its business glossary capabilities, organizations can enhance their data governance, improve data understanding, and secure sensitive information.
Import the 'Healthcare' Glossary
Ensure you have logged in as: Business Steward.
Username
business_steward@hv.com
Password
Welcome123!
Click Glossary in the left navigation menu & select: Import from the drop=down Actions menu options.
In the Glossary Items field, browse and select the file you want to import. You can also download a template if needed.
In Data Catalog, you can import a glossary from a file in one of the following file types:
• JavaScript Object Notation (application/json)
• Comma Separated Values (text/csv)
• Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (application/vnd.ms-excel)
View the imported terms in the left glossary item tree.
Create a Glossary
Establishing a hierarchical structure by categorizing business terms into domains and specific categories simplifies data navigation and management. This organized structure boosts efficient data discovery and strengthens governance through role-based access controls. In the realm of data management, business terms are crucial in a data catalog, guaranteeing seamless identification, access, and utilization of data in line with organizational goals and compliance mandates.
Ensure you have logged in as: Business Steward.
Username
business_steward@hv.com
Password
Welcome123!
Click Glossary in the left navigation menu & select 'Add New Glossary'.
Enter 'Test' and click 'Create'.
Enter a Definition & Purpose by clicking on the Edit option.
Click 'Save Changes'.
The following panels enable to track and audit any changes to the Glossary.
The Properties panel enables you to track and audit any changes.
Property
Value(s)
Sensitivity
LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH
Domain
Enter Domain name
Custodian
Search & Select from list of users
Business Steward
Search & Select the Business Steward
Critical Data Element
This property is usually applied to columns. These columns should be critical pieces of information that are necessary for decision making and so need to be governed with the highest care.
Status
Accepted, Draft, Review, Deprecated
Besides organizing your Glossary by Domain & Catagory, the Data Catalog allows you to assign tags to your resources. A tag is a label you can use to describe an element and to retrieve it later when browsing or searching.
You can manually add a Tag: Healthcare
Save & Test by searching for: 'Test'
You can select the colour & change the icon.
The UI will also allow to set / add:
• A star rating
• Associate with Business Rule(s)
• Add Comments
• Add Owners
• Tags
Select 'Test' Domain & then 'Add New Category'
Enter the Category Name: 'Test Category' & select Parent: 'Test'.
Click 'Create'.
Enter a Definition & Purpose by clicking on the Edit option.
Enter the Term Name: 'Test Term' & select Parent: 'Test Category'.
Click 'Create'.
Enter a Definition & Purpose by clicking on the Edit option.
In a data catalog, a Business Term refers to metadata that describes the business aspects of a data asset. For example, a business term might indicate whether the data represents customer demographics, financial transactions, or product inventory.
Custom Term
A Business Term can also be associated 'free text' or 'custom values'.
An example could be to either create a Term - Marital Status - and either associate with a Rule or some (database) custom values: M, S, D, and so on ..
Under our 'Test Category' let's create a Business Term - - and assciate it with
Click the 'Custom' tab.
Click the “+ Add Custom Property” button.
Enter the Label, default value and select either Free text or Select Value that will be associated with the Term.
Click 'Save'.
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Data Elements
A data element within a data catalog plays a crucial role in organizing and managing an organization’s data assets.
These assets can include structured (tabular) data, unstructured data (such as documents, web pages, and social media content), reports, query results, data visualizations, dashboards, machine learning models, and connections between databases.
A Data Element refers to an entity in your data source. With JDBC datasources the options are:
SCHEMA
TABLE
COLUMN
In this example were going to associated our Test Term with the Social Security Number (SSN) - a column in the Patients table.
