Business Glossary tools

List of tools that help build, maintain an share business glossaries.

Business Glossary is a collection of definitions and terms used within a business unitorganization. It is not used to define data, but rather to define what a particular term means from a business perspective. The definitions are mapped and logically linked to entities in the database. This enables structured communication between teams and allows them to reveal potential errors resulting from incorrect nomenclature.

Dataedo

Dataedo Business Glossary tool provides glossary of business terms, their definitions, relationships between each other and mapping to data assets elements. It allows creating different types of terms, such as term, category, policy and rule. Using Dataedo Business Glossary you can define relationships between terms, categories, rules and policies in the catalog.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: HTML,MS Excel,PDF
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes
Dataedo Business Glossary
Dataedo Business Glossary Table View
Dataedo Business Term

Collibra Data Governance Center

Collibra Data Governance Center enables you to organize and understand data in your enterprise. It allows you to define the terminology, rules and regulations that matter to your business, document your metadata and its use, and create, review and update data policies.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: HTML,PDF
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog allows to add rich business context to the data by associating business terms with the right technical metadata. It enables automatic association of business terms with the technical metadata, which helps eliminate a tedious manual process for data governance. This allows business and IT stewards to collaboratively manage business metadata that includes efficient human workflow automation.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: CSV,MS Excel,Plain text,XML
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

Talend Data Catalog

Talend Data Catalog automatically crawls, profiles, organizes, links, and enriches all your metadata. The tool supports data privacy and regulatory compliance with intelligent data lineage tracing and compliance tracking. With a collaborative user experience, it enables anyone to contribute metadata or business glossary information.

Data Policies and Rules: No
Export: CSV,MS Excel,XML
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: No
Support for workflow: Yes

Alteryx Connect

Alteryx Connect is one of a kind of data governance and collaborative exploration platform for data asset discovery, sharing, and validation. It can be used as an enterprise business glossary where you define your standard business terms in a data dictionary and link them to assets in the data catalog so that context and meaning of assets are consistent across teams with a common vocabulary.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: CSV,MS Excel,PDF
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog (IGC) is a web-based tool that allows you to explore, understand, and analyze information. You can create, manage, and share a common business language, document and enact policies and rules, and track data lineage.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: CSV,XMI,XML
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: No

erwin Data Literacy

erwin Data Literacy enables to build glossaries of terms in taxonomies with synonyms, acronyms and relationships to describe the organization’s data assets. Publish approved standards for these terms to the wider organization to improve clarity/precision of language. Also prioritize terms, flagging information regarding regulatory requirements.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: -
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

Ataccama Metadata Management & Data Catalog

Ataccama Data Catalog & Business Glossary tool manages business terms in your organization. Terms are automatically mapped to existing data sets ensuring the Data Catalog and Business Glossary are always synced and up-to-date. Custom hierarchy structure allows organized storing of items into an unlimited hierarchy structure.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: CSV,MS Excel,XML
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: No
Support for workflow: Yes

Apache Atlas

Apache Atlas is the one stop solution for data governance and metadata management on enterprise Hadoop clusters. Its glossary feature enables you to define a hierarchical set of business terms that represents your
business domain. You can then associate these glossary terms with the metadata entities that Atlas manages. This
hierarchical business catalog makes it easier to organize and discover data stored in Hadoop.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: -
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: No

OvalEdge

OvalEdge is a data governance tool that allows to build a business glossary and define data quality rules. It enables to manage data access through policies, controls, and workflows.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: -
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

a.k.a. Designer

The a.k.a.® Designer is an integrated development environment that lets you create and manage all of the components for building tools for information management. Users or developers can create their own metadata, entities and relationships, then combine these together to build an extensive range of information management schemes.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: HTML,XML
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: No

Data3Sixty Govern

Data3Sixty Govern provides data governance that delivers data quality, trust and value in a smart and intuitive solution. It automatically generate a business language for data while easily collaborating across business areas on common data definitions, rules and policies.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: MS Excel
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: No
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

Alation Data Catalog

Alation’s Business Glossary enables the creation of definitions, policies, rules, and KPIs through a rich, user-friendly interface. By leveraging machine learning, Alation’s Business Glossary automatically suggests business terms, identifies stewards and subject matter experts based on usage patterns, and incorporates crowdsourcing and collaboration to easily scale documentation.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: MS Excel
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

Axon Data Governance

Axon Data Governance is the collaboration hub for successful data governance programs. It allows you to develop a common data dictionary to provide a consistent source of business context across multiple tools and ensure that teams can quickly find the data they need to uncover analytics insights with an integrated data catalog.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: -
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management

Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management (OEMM) is a comprehensive metadata management platform. OEMM provides an ISO 11179 based business glossary to capture, define, maintain and implement an enterprise business glossary of terminology, data definitions, code sets, domains, validation rules, and so on.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: CSV
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

There are many tools for creating business glossaries. Whether sophisticated or not, they allow to create:
• access and alternate names,
• descriptions,
• explanations of how to calculate metrics,
• links to other elements.

To ensure access to all terms from different platforms, many business glossary tools are cross-platform compatible. More advanced tools provide a workflow to ensure that term definitions are updated and approved. In addition to the glossary creation features, the tools allow you to export to user-friendly and easy-to-share formats like PDF and HTML.

Proper communication between teams in an organization is crucial for the success of the project. Similarly, it is important to interpret data correctly. Each of the teams working together (business team, developers, marketing teams), use different nomenclature and terms. Within a team the logical meaning of data elements, acronyms, etc. are defined and understood only by a narrow group of members. This makes the area of inconsistency really wide. Even small misunderstandings can lead to fatal consequences. This is where the business glossary comes into play.

What's more, using glossaries not only makes the communication more reliable, but also improves efficiency and speeds up the decision-making process (e.g. wondering if "customer" means a single person, an organization, and repeating the consideration next time the project is approached).

In our list, we have included noteworthy business tools for creating and reviewing business glossaries.