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.

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

Everteam

Everteam is an effective tool for capturing, documenting, and maintaining retention and governance policies for the entire enterprise. It is a simple-to-use SaaS solution that allows organizations to quickly develop, publish, and maintain enterprise-wide information policies.

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

Atlan

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

Sidecar

Sidecar business glossary allows you to easily enrich all your data assets with business context, clear definitions, rules and transformations to bring clarity to data consumers. Foster team work among the user community by exchanging ideas on data assets with the collaboration tool. Add custom tags and classifications to organize your assets and manage your sensitive data by building a comprehensive business glossary across your company.

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

Select Star

Select Star has a metrics feature that allows you to define key terms and values based on data that aim to answer specific business questions. Select Star can automatically detect dimensions that you may want to group or pivot on, but you can remove these if desired or search for others.

Data Policies and Rules: No
Export: CSV,JSON
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.