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

https://dataedo.com/product/business-glossary-tool

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:
Export:	HTML,MS Excel,PDF
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Talend Data Catalog

https://www.talend.com/products/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:
Export:	CSV,MS Excel,XML
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Alteryx Connect

https://www.alteryx.com/products/alteryx-platform/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:
Export:	CSV,MS Excel,PDF
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IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog

https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/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:
Export:	CSV,XMI,XML
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Alation Data Catalog

https://www.alation.com/solutions/data-governance/business-glossary/?utm_source=dbmstools&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=business_glossary

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:
Export:	MS Excel
Integration with Technical Metadata:
Linkage to reports/apps:
Reference data:
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ER/Studio

https://www.idera.com/er-studio-enterprise-data-modeling-and-architecture-tools

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:
Export:	CSV,HTML,PDF,XML
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Reference data:
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Go to vendor website

Atlan

https://atlan.com/

Atlan Business Glossary allows data producers and consumers in an organization to create a living tribal knowledge network across all of their data assets. Powered by a knowledge graph, Atlan allows users to define business terms, categories, policies, relationships and more. Atlan's machine learning based bot ecosystem automates several repetitive tasks associated with maintaining a business glossary such as auto tagging business glossary terms to data assets, propagating classification and glossary tagging rules via lineage, bulk associate glossary terms to data assets via an API and more. Its easy to use google like search interface makes it easy for business users to find the meaning of business terms within seconds while ensuring the compliance of business metadata across the enterprise.

Data Policies and Rules:
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Go to vendor website

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.