InfoSphere Business Glossary tasks

You can use InfoSphere® Business Glossary to create a business glossary, which is a central information collection that helps users in your enterprise understand business language and the business meaning of information assets.

Your organization can use InfoSphere Business Glossary to complete the following tasks:

Browse and search for terms and categories

To understand the meaning of business terms as defined in the enterprise, users can browse and search for terms and categories in the business glossary.

For example, an analyst might want to find out how the term "Accepted Flag Type" is defined in his business. The analyst can use InfoSphere Business Glossary or IBM® InfoSphere Business Glossary Anywhere to find the definition of the term, its usage, and other terms related to it. The analyst can also find out what information governance rules and information assets are related to the term and can find out details about these assets.

Develop and share a common vocabulary between business and technology

A common vocabulary gives diverse users a common understanding of business concepts, improving communication and efficiency.

For example, one department in an organization might use the word "customer," a second department might use the word "user," and a third department might use the word "client," all to describe the same type of individual. You can use InfoSphere Business Glossary to capture these terms, define their meaning, create relationships between them and consolidate terminology to achieve increased precision in communications. Other business glossary users can refer to this information at any time.

Associate business information with other information assets

Glossary authors can attach business meaning to technical assets and other information sources by assigning them to business terms and information governance rules.

Technical assets, such as database columns, tables, or schemas that reside in the InfoSphere Information Server metadata repository, can be shared with other InfoSphere Information Server products. As a result, users of InfoSphere Business Glossary can view information about these technical assets, and depending upon their access rights, associate the assets with terms or rules that are defined in the business glossary.

Develop and share a common set of information governance policies and rules

Information governance policies and rules give team members a common understanding of business requirements or objectives and an understanding of how to manage information assets to comply with those requirements or objectives.

By defining information governance policies and information governance rules in InfoSphere Business Glossary, users can easily share business requirements and objectives and describe how information assets comply with those requirements and objectives with the appropriate members of your enterprise. The integration capabilities between information governance rules, operational rules, and information assets close the loop between declared business objectives and implemented data governance.

Once defined, information governance rules can be associated with runtime data rules such as archiving rules, data quality rules, security rules, and data standardization rules. In addition, information governance rules can be associated with terms and with data assets such as databases, tables, columns and model objects. Within InfoSphere Business Glossary, you can specify the type of relationship that the information governance rule has to the information asset. For example, you can specify whether the information governance rule is implemented by, or should be implemented by, an information asset. You can also specify the inverse relationship to indicate that an information asset implements a particular information governance rule. In addition, you can specify that a rule governs an asset, or that an asset is governed by a rule.

View relationships between business glossary assets and other assets

In addition to learning about the relationships between business glossary assets and other information assets, users can also view business lineage reports to discover how data flows among information assets.

InfoSphere Business Glossary, when used in conjunction with InfoSphere Metadata Workbench, provides information about the flow of data among information assets. For example, a business lineage report might show the flow of data from one database table to another database table, and from there to another report.