Business Glossary
Agreeing what a term means before arguing about which number is right.
4 to work through
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beginner
A 60-person company is told it needs a business glossary. Twelve people work with data and there are about 25 terms that anyone argues about. A glossary tool costs a subscription and a week of setup. What does the tool buy over one spreadsheet with a named owner, and when does the spreadsheet win?
3 min answer -
intermediate
A governance programme harvests 1,400 candidate business terms from dashboard titles and column comments and proposes to define and own all of them. Roughly how many terms can an organisation actually keep true, and what does that number change about the plan?
3 min answer -
intermediate
Finance, sales and product each define "active customer" differently, and all three are correct for their purpose. How should the glossary handle this?
1 min answer -
intermediate
Three dashboards report different numbers for "active users" and each is defensible. What is the actual problem, and what does a semantic layer have to provide to fix it?
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Business Glossary
An agreed set of business term definitions, owned by the business and linked to the physical data assets that implement them.
metricGlossary Term Half-Life
The time after which half a glossary's definitions no longer match the SQL that implements them, measured by sampling rather than assumed, and used t…
practiceTerm Definition Ownership
Assigning one accountable owner per business term, so that a disagreement about meaning has a route to resolution rather than a standing argument.
Neighbouring topics
Data Governance & Semantics
General material on ownership, meaning, quality and control of data at enterprise scale.
Data Mesh
Domain ownership, data as a product, self-serve platform, and federated governance.
Data Products
A dataset with an owner, an interface, an SLO, and consumers who can rely on it.
Data Contracts
Producers committing to schema, semantics and freshness, and breaking builds when they do not.
Data Catalog
Discovery, ownership and technical metadata, and why catalogues go stale.
Semantic Layer
Metric definitions held once and served to every tool that asks.
Master Data Management
One authoritative record for a customer or product across systems that each have their own.
Reference Data
Code lists, hierarchies and currencies — small, shared, and quietly load-bearing.
Data Quality Dimensions
Completeness, accuracy, timeliness, consistency, validity and uniqueness as testable claims.
Data Observability
Freshness, volume, schema and distribution monitoring for pipelines that fail silently.
Data Stewardship
The operating model that makes ownership a role rather than a slide.
Data Access Models
Role, attribute and purpose-based access over analytical data, and how they compose.
Row & Column-Level Security
Restricting slices of a table rather than the whole table, and where it is enforced.
Tokenisation & Masking
Dynamic masking, deterministic tokens, and preserving joinability without exposure.
Retention & Purge
Deleting from an append-only estate, and proving the deletion happened.
Data Sharing & Clean Rooms
Collaborating on data neither party may hand over, with computation as the interface.
Sensitivity Labelling
Propagating a classification through joins and derived tables so controls follow the data.
BI Governance
Dashboard sprawl, certified reports, and the number the board is allowed to see.
Self-Service vs Governed
Letting analysts move fast without four teams reporting four different revenues.