Data Governance & Semantics
General material on ownership, meaning, quality and control of data at enterprise scale.
3 to work through
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advanced Multiple choice
A multi-tenant business application holds customer data for tens of thousands of organisations, each with its own compliance obligations. Which governance model actually works at that scale?
1 min answer -
advanced
An interviewer says - our data governance programme is eighteen months old. We have a catalogue, a glossary, twelve part-time stewards and a monthly council. The CFO asked last week whether it is working and I could not answer. What would you measure, and what would you tell leadership if the numbers are bad?
3 min answer -
advanced
You inherit an enterprise data estate with no governance at all and a two-year mandate. What do you do first?
1 min answer
2 terms in this topic
Data Mesh Federated Governance
Central agreement on the rules that must be global, with domain autonomy over everything else.
conceptDecision Rights Over Data
Who is entitled to decide what a data element means, who may see it and how long it is kept — the substance of governance once the policy documents a…
Neighbouring topics
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.
Business Glossary
Agreeing what a term means before arguing about which number is right.
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.