Business Glossary tools for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)

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 helps organizations build a structured business glossary to define key business terms, ensuring a common understanding across departments. This reduces confusion, enhances communication, and supports regulatory compliance.

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
Business Glossary
Business Glossary terms
Business Glossary Term

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
Informatica business glossary

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: Yes
Export: CSV,JSON,MS Excel,PDF,XML
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

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
OvalEdge business glossary - term attributes
OvalEdge business glossary

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: CSV,MS Excel,XML
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,JSON,MS Excel
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

Collibra Catalog

Collibra is a data governance and management platform that offers a robust business glossary tool, enabling organizations to define and maintain consistent definitions for business terms, metrics, and data elements. It helps ensure clear communication and understanding across departments by providing a centralized repository for standardized terminology, which supports data consistency, compliance, and improved decision-making.

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

Dawiso

Dawiso serves as a business glossary tool that helps organizations define and manage key business terms consistently across teams. It centralizes definitions, ensuring a shared understanding of terms and improving communication around data assets.

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

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.