Entry of Business and Data Assets

Following diagram show the different ways to create a Business Term or Acronym and how it follows different intake and approval processes.

How to create a new Business Term or Acronym?

There are four ways to create a new Business Term or Acronym:

  1. Propose it to the Data Governance Council via the Dashboard;
  2. Create it from scratch in an existing Glossary;
  3. Create it via import from existing lexicons, thesauri, or metadata repositories;
  4. Create it via discovery in text documents.

Proposal via Dashboard

There are two reasons why you would want to propose a new Business Term via the DGC Dashboard. 

  1. You do not want add it to your own Glossary and leave the decision where to put it to the Data Governance Council.
  2. You do not have any steward role that allows you to add it to a Glossary.

The tool functionality to propose a new Business Term is explained in the DGC  User’s Guide  page on The Dashboard.

Make sure that you provide the following information so the Data Governance Council can move it to the appropriate Community and Domain.

  1. Name: choose a preferred string to spell out your Business Term. The autocomplete functionality will show similar existing terms as you are typing wiht the aim to prevent you from introducing a duplicate. E.g., Annual Purchase Account. 
  2. Type: select the type: Business Term or Acronym
  3. Proposed Definition: give an initial definition that is as clear and concise as possible. E.g., “The amount of purchase for a given customer in a specific year”.
  4. Related Assets: indicate Assets that you think are related to your proposed Business Term. These should be derivable from the nouns in your proposed definition. E.g., Customer, Amount, Year
  5. Reason for Proposal: clarify the context for your proposal or the person that requested you to make the proposal. 

From Scratch

If you do not have directly useful documentation, then start a new Glossary. Provide clear and concise description for your Glossary and limit the scope to key Business TermsKPIs and Acronyms for the subject area. For example, in the Customer Glossary that is owned by the Sales Community in Cool Coffee Inc., the key Business Term is Customer, the key KPI is Revenue per Customer.

When defining these key Glossary Assets further by, e.g., relating them with other assets through fact types, the need for additional Business Terms quickly arises. For example, Name and Address would be typical terms to identify a Customer. There are two possibilities:

  1. the term already exists in another domain. In this example Name is already an agreed Business Term in the enterprise-wide Glossary.
  2. the term does not exist so you have to create it. It is better to create general-purpose terms in a designated glossaryDoing so it is more easy to share them between subject areas.

Import from Existing Repositories

Most probably you already have existing metadata repositories and would like to import them in DGC. After importing there are two options:

  1. use DGC as authentic source and to manage them further in DGC;
  2. use DGC only to view and regularly update the views from the authentic source.

Discovering in Text

A third option is to discover terms in unstructured documentation. For example, the screenshot below shows the result of discovering terms in the Wikipedia entry “customer”. Terms are enlisted in the order of frequency.

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