At the Department of Economy, Science and Innovation of the Flemish Public Administration, they have devised a lifecycle for the management of business glossaries in an ecosystem of independent organizations including universities and research institutes. The diagram below illustrates the top-level Data Governance Council populated with stakeholders within the Department and delegates from the respective sub-communities (only three are shown but there are many more). The latter each represent these independent organizations that have to report data on their performance – in terms of, i.a., publication output, research staff and grant acquisitions – to the Department on a timely basis. All these communities have a high stake to agree on the semantics of business and data assets.

The diagram also illustrates five main statuses (omitting the status rejection) through which a term goes. This construct can form the starting point for many data governance organizations.

1. Candidate: after the need for a term has been issued in a ticket request, it automatically receives the status of “candidate”.
2. From Candidate to Proposed: the Data Governance Council is responsible to decide on the on-boarding of the candidate term. Therefore, the DGO Secretary writes a motivation to allow the Council to make an informed decision. If the on-boarding is accepted, the terms status is raised to “proposed”. After that the Secretary moves the ownership of the proposed term to one of the sub-community presumed to master the subject matter the best.
3. From Proposed to Draft: the subject matter experts of the target sub-community drafts the term (adding definitions, other attributes and relations).
4. From Draft to In-Review: Once the subject matter experts have finished the drafting, the approval workflow is initiated where other role players are asked for input or comments. The new status is “in-review”.
5. From “In-Review to Accepted”: if the approval was positive the new status is leveraged to “accepted”, and the token of command is returned to the Data Governance Council who continues other activities such as mapping the accepted term to a universal term index.
6. From “Accepted to Deployed”: (not shown in the diagram): finally the new term is deployed in the business practice, and this may involve another status change to “deployed”.

See also: Managing Financial Code Hierarchies across Time and Context.