Glossary Overview

In TDC , a glossary is a self-contained and extensible metamodel-based collection of business objects referred to as terms . In turn, the terms may be directly linked (be used to document objects ) to objects in the repository, such as tables and columns in a data model, may be associated with data classes to support automatic data class discovery and classification of objects, and also may be semantically mapped to objects throughout the rest of the repository. Once term defined, classified or mapped, the objects will have semantic lineage results such as definition lookups or term semantic usage across any configuration which contains the glossary and mapped or classified objects.

Building a glossary can be as simple as dragging in an existing well documented data model (imported using one of the metadata bridges), imported using a CSV format, or can be populated directly via the user interface. To ensure that the glossary is accurate, up-to-date, available to all who need access to it and integrated properly with the rest of the metadata in the repository, TDC also provides a robust collection of data governance tools and methodologies. The TDC glossary may be managed through a very flexible workflow and publication process that may alternatively be quite sophisticated or quite simple depending upon your needs. In addition, one may maintain any number of business glossaries, each with different workflow and publication characteristics.