Planning, designing, and publishing the catalog
In IBM® InfoSphere® Information Governance Catalog, a catalog is an authoritative dictionary of the assets that are used throughout the organization. One of the main benefits of a well-designed catalog is increased trust and confidence in organization information.
Planning, designing, and publishing a catalog involves several tasks. Initially, you need to develop the business definitions, requirements, and compliance objectives of your organization. With this information, you can then decide which assets are needed. Use descriptive language of what the assets are and how they are important in your organization. Involve IT professionals who can author and maintain the assets in the catalog. These professionals can work with subject matter experts to ensure that the correct data sources are used and that data quality is maintained.
If your catalog currently has no content, identify the top 100 terms that have high business visibility in your organization and put them all into a single category. Send the terms for review and revision to team members. Expand the scope of reviewers with each iteration to get broad feedback. After each group of terms is approved, add more terms to the category and continue the iterative review process. When all of the basic terms that you need for your organization are in the catalog, you can then create more categories and build a category structure. Move the terms into the appropriate category to give the terms added business meaning.
- Glossary assets
- Glossary assets are terms, categories, information governance policies, and information governance rules. They can be created in the catalog by different methods and in different formats. In addition, you can import a glossary model that is suited to your industry by using IBM Industry Models. You can also convert BI model assets and logical data model assets that were imported into the catalog into terms and categories. You can convert IBM InfoSphere Data Architect naming model words into terms.
- Information assets
- The catalog can also contain information assets, which are assets other than glossary assets. Metadata about information assets such as database tables, jobs, BI reports, and other assets can be represented in the catalog.
In InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog, you can assign custom attributes, labels, and stewards to assets in the catalog. When you create or import assets into the catalog, you can also assign their relationships to other assets.
By using the workflow feature, you can publish glossary assets that are ready for use by the organization while you continue to develop other glossary assets that are not ready for use. As a best practice, evaluate the results of each task as you complete it. The results of one task might affect the direction that you take in the next task. This ongoing evaluation process fine tunes the catalog to achieve the highest-quality content.
The following diagram shows the process to develop your catalog. Use this process for each group of assets that you develop.Click a section of the diagram to view the topic about that part of the catalog development process.
