Business Glossary tools for Informix

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

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

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

ER/Studio

ER/Studio Enterprise Team Edition provides robust logical and physical modeling, business process and conceptual modeling, creation of enterprise data dictionary, business glossaries, and more. It enables you to document and enhance data and metadata for enterprise architectures, and share and collaborate on global business glossary terms and definitions.

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

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.