Understanding InfoSphere Business Glossary

What is Business Glossary?

The business glossary is a formal contract between the producers and consumers of information across the enterprise.

It is intended to be the artifact or reference that allows anyone to determine the meaning, type and context of any term and, in particular, any business data element used in an initiative.

Business Glossary is a tool for Authoring, Managing, and Sharing Business Metadata. Business Glossary is a tool for business users that enables –

• The creation & management of a controlled vocabulary
• Collaborative authoring of business metadata

A reference for learning about the information assets of the enterprise –

• Meaning
• Dependencies
• Usage
• Quality
• Ownership/Responsibility

Benefits of InfoSphere Business Glossary –

Business Glossary provides users with a web-based tool for creating and managing standard definitions of business and organization concepts by using a controlled vocabulary.

The tool divides metadata into categories, each of which contains terms. One can use terms to classify other objects in the metadata repository that are based on the needs of the organization.

One can also designate users or groups as stewards for metadata objects. The result is a system that builds a common language between business and information technology.

Enables data governance

• Common language supports compliance regulations such as Basel II
• Represent and expose business relationships and lineage
• Track history of changes

 Accountability and responsibility

• Assign stewards as single point of contact

 Improved productivity

• Administrators can tailor the tool to the needs of their business users
• Access enterprise information you need when you need it
• Use and re-use information assets based on common semantic hub

Increased collaboration

• Capture and share annotations between team members
• Greater understanding of the context of information
• More prevalent use and reuse of trusted information

Why InfoSphere Business Glossary?

The business glossary organizes metadata into categories that contain terms. Terms can relate to the assets that are stored in the metadata repository or to external assets according to the standards and practices of the enterprise.

One can also designate specific users or user groups as stewards who are responsible for particular assets. Assets in this instance refer to instances of metadata within the metadata repository.

Business Glossary is designed to also provide –

• Linkage between business Terms and IT assets for understanding the contexts of IT and business
• Designed to answer: Where are the connection points?
• Assignment of Data Stewards to Terms and IT Assets
• A customizable, publishable set of business Terms

 Business Glossary is not designed to be –

• A data modeling tool (Rational Architect)
• An enterprise architecture hub for reuse of technical metadata by development applications (Information Server)
• An enterprise metadata repository (XMETA and Metadata Workbench)

A common vocabulary gives diverse users a common understanding of business concepts, improving communication and efficiency.

For example: one department in an organization might use the word “customer,” a second department might use the word “user,” and a third department might use the word “client,” all to describe the same type of individual.

Business Glossary enables the enterprise to capture these terms, define their meaning, create relationships between them (in the example above, where all three terms have the same meaning, they would be synonyms) and consolidate terminology to achieve increased precision in communications.