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Hitachi Vantara Lumada and Pentaho Documentation

Managing business glossaries

Parent article

Lumada Data Catalog provides a single location for creating, organizing, curating, and identifying business terms to help you navigate your vast data environment so you can get the right data efficiently. You also can use glossaries as a tool with role-based access control to secure and separate valuable data and metadata and prevent such data from reaching unintended audiences.

In Data Catalog, business terms are organized into business glossaries. Using the Business Glossary, you can manage or browse the business glossaries for your data environment.

The Built-in_Terms glossary is created by Lumada Data Catalog and contains primarily field terms to identify commonly recognized data set attributes, such as first names, credit card numbers, or SSNs. You cannot modify or delete the Built-in_Terms glossary or the terms within it.

Your interaction with the business glossaries is determined by your role and assigned permissions. For example, users who are assigned the Administrator role can create new glossaries and associate roles with glossaries. Users assigned the Analyst role can add terms within glossaries and create associations for existing terms within the glossaries for which they are assigned access.

If you are assigned the administrator role, you have the following permissions for business glossary:

Administrator permissions for Business Glossary
PermissionAbout
Manage Business GlossaryCreate, read, update, and delete all glossaries.
Associate Roles with Business GlossariesYou can only assign the glossaries that are visible to the current Administrator role.

Requires the Manage User Roles permission.

If you are assigned the Business User role, your permissions for business glossary differ based on if you are assigned the Analyst sub-role or the Guest sub-role.

Analyst permissions for Business Glossary
PermissionAbout
Manage Business TermsCreate, read, update, and delete glossaries. You can manage all public terms, but you cannot associate them with entities.
Associate Business TermsCurate terms and accept/reject term associations. You can only curate terms from assigned glossaries.

Requires the View Business Glossaries permission to see the terms from assigned glossaries.

Guest permissions for Business Glossary
PermissionAbout
View Business TermsView and accept/reject proposed public terms. You can only view terms from glossaries you have permission to view.

Requires the View Business Glossaries permission to see the terms from assigned glossaries.

View Business GlossariesView business glossaries within the role scope.

Tour the Business Glossary page

The Business Glossary page displays the glossaries available to you in the left panel. When you select a glossary or term in this panel, you can view summary information, details, and associated rules for the glossary or term on the page. Select the corresponding button for the view you want.

  • Summary view

    In the Summary view for a glossary or term, you can view the following information. Note that some information is only visible for either glossary or term.

    FeatureDescription
    Term name or Glossary nameName of the term or glossary in your catalog. Select the pencil icon if you want to edit this name. For terms, you can select the flag icon to set the sensitivity of the term.
    Description Add or edit the description of the glossary or term. For example, you may want to describe the purpose of the specified term for your users.
    Statistics (for a glossary)This section provides the total number of terms, business entities, and data elements in the glossary.
    Key Metrics This panel provides important information at a glance, including the following:
    • Sensitivity (for a term)

      Indicates the sensitivity level of the term.

    • Associated Data Elements

      Includes the number of each type of data element association that can be made within the glossary. You can drill down to view the associated data elements by clicking their icons.

      • blue question mark icon: Suggested associations.
      • green check mark icon: Accepted associations
      • red X icon: Rejected associations
      • scope icon: Seeded associations
    StatusThis section indicates the current status of the selected glossary or term.
    • Last Update

      A timestamp indicating when the glossary or term was last updated.

    • building iconBusiness Entity (for a parent term)

      Allow users to create a business entity using this term. Select the check box to turn on this permission. Clear the check box to turn off this permission.

    • anchor iconAnchor (for a child term)

      Allow users to set the term as an anchor term. Select the check box to turn on this permission. Clear the check box to turn off this permission.

    Style (for a glossary)Displays the icon and color associated with the glossary, if any. Select Change to edit the associated icon or color.
    Glossary Properties (for a term)Displays the associated glossary and its properties.
    • Glossary

      The name of the glossary.

    • Icon & Color

      The icon and color used to indicate terms in the glossary.

    Properties Displays the properties of the glossary or term.
    • Created By

      The username of the user who created the item.

    • Reference Term (for term)

      An option to create a reference term.

    Workflow
    • Author

      The user who initiated the workflow on the current asset.

    • Summary

      Summary of the workflow.

    • Assignee

      The user to whom the workflow is currently assigned.

    • Status

      The status of the Workflow. (Draft, In Review, To Approval, Approved)

    • View Workflow Details

      Click to view the workflow details.

    • View Changes

      Click to view the changes.

  • Settings tab

    On the Settings tab, you can see more information about the glossary or term.

    For a glossary, you see a table containing all the terms in the glossary. From here, you can select the columns of information to display about the terms, show filters for viewing term information, and add or delete terms.

    For a term, you can

    • set whether Automated Discovery, Keep Learning, Free Text (only for structured data), and Anonymous Data (only for unstructured data) to on or off,
    • choose whether to identify a term by a Value or a Regular Expression and see data about the fields associated with the term.
    • filter the Seed Field and Rejected Field items and select the columns of information to display the details. Additionally, you can perform operations like Do not use as Seed for Seed Field items (only for Identify Term by Value) and Use in Learning or Do not Use in Learning for Rejected Field items.
    • select the Asset Type that is Structured, Unstructured, or both (only for Identify Term by Regular Expression).
    • set a range of confidence percentages under the Discovery Setting. Suggestions with a lower confidence percentage than the Confidence Lower Limit value will be ignored by automatic discovery. Suggestions with a higher confidence percentage than the Confidence Upper Limit value will be automatically accepted.
  • Workflow tab

    On the Workflow tab, you can see Active Workflows and Workflow history.

  • Associations tab

    On the Associations tab, you can view associations of business terms (only accpeted or suggested) with data assets and perform operations like Use as Seed or Remove as Seed, and Do not Use In Learning.

    You can also add, view, and delete associations of business terms with another business term. For more information, refer Managing associations.

Create a new glossary

You can use glossaries to organize and group terms used by different departments within your organization to group resources of common interest. A glossary is required for users to create terms. Even if you are not sure what your glossaries will be when you first install Data Catalog, you will want to create at least one temporary glossary.

Perform the following steps to create a glossary:

Procedure

  1. Click Glossary in the left navigation menu.

    The Business Glossary page opens.
  2. Click Add New and select Glossary.

    The Create Glossary dialog box opens.
  3. In the Glossary Name field, enter a name for the glossary.

    NoteGlossary names can contain only alphanumeric characters, a single space, and the special characters underscore ( _ ) and dash ( - ).
  4. Click Create.

    The glossary is created and displays in the list of glossaries in the Business Glossary navigation tree.
  5. Click Add Description to add a description. Enter the description and click Save Description or Cancel to cancel.

Next steps

Repeat steps 1 through 5 to create additional glossaries.

Create a new business term

Glossaries are managed with role-based access control and group terms that will be used by data analysts to label their glossary specific data. Newly created terms are always associated with a glossary.

Perform the following steps to create a new term:

Procedure

  1. Click Glossary in the left navigation menu and click Add New.

  2. Select Term.

    The Create Business Term dialog box appears.
  3. In the Term Name field, enter a name that uniquely identifies the new business term in Data Catalog.

    Term names can contain only alphanumeric characters, a single space, and the special characters underscore ( _ ) and dash ( - ).
  4. In the Glossary field, enter the glossary under which this new term will be grouped.

    If you selected a glossary from the list before creating a new term, then the selected glossary is automatically pre-selected as the new term's glossary. You can select a different glossary if necessary.
  5. (Optional) In the Parent Term field, select the parent term if the new term is to be a child of an existing parent term.

  6. Click Create.

    The new term is created and displayed.
  7. Click Add Description to add a description. Enter the description and click Save Description.

  8. (Optional) To set the sensitivity level of the type of data that will be tagged with this term, click the flag next to the term name and choose from the following settings:

    Highly SensitiveTypically used for the most sensitive data like PAN, SSN, Account numbers, and FirstName-LastName combination.
    Medium SensitiveGenerally reserved for data with medium sensitivity like First_Name only, Last_Name only, address, and policy number.
    Low SensitiveData that is not necessarily personally identifiable or that does not generally pose a security risk.
    Non SensitiveThe default sensitivity setting for a term. Generic non-sensitive data falls into this category.
    Unknown Sensitivity
    If not specifically changed, the new term is marked as Unknown Sensitivity.
    NoteWhen a term is associated or suggested on a resource as a resource term or a field term, it will indirectly dictate the sensitivity of the resource. The resource sensitivity is automatically set to the highest sensitivity term associated or suggested on that resource.
  9. (Optional) To change the term name, click the pencil icon next to the term name. Edit the text and click the check mark to save, or the X to cancel.

Create a reference term

Any term can be a reference term. If a term is similar to another term, you may want to link the terms by designating one of them as a reference term. You must have edit permission for the glossary in which the reference term is located.
  • When reference terms are defined for business entity members, after successful term discovery only the associations for the business entity member (referred) term are suggested for fields. The original reference term suggestions are removed for these fields.
  • When reference terms are defined for terms that do not belong to a business entity, both term associations (one for the referring term and one for the original reference term) are shown.

Perform the following steps to create a reference term:

Procedure

  1. Click Glossary in the left navigation menu.

    The Business Glossary page opens.
  2. Select the term you want to point to a reference term.

    NoteThe selected term is considered the referring term.
  3. In Item Properties in the Summary tab, hover over the Reference Term field, and click Add New.

  4. Start typing the name of the term to use as a reference term and select the best match from the list that displays.

    Reference term suggestions that appear in the field are limited to terms in glossaries that are accessible to your user role.
  5. Click Save.

Delete a business term

Deleting a term irrevocably deletes all its associations in Data Catalog.
NoteBecause you cannot recover this data, use caution when deleting terms.

This task assumes you are on the Business Glossary page.

Perform the following steps to delete a business term:

Procedure

  1. In the left navigation tree, select the term to delete.

  2. Click Actions at the bottom of the tree and select Remove from the menu that appears.

    A dialog box displays, asking you to confirm the deletion.
  3. Type yes in the text box and click Confirm.

Results

The term is deleted.

Edit a glossary

After a glossary is created, administrators can edit the glossary features, such as name, description, and style, including assigning a unique color and icon to a glossary.

For example, if both the Finance glossary and the Claims glossary have a term named "category", then these terms each have an independent identity: the "Finance.category" and the "Claims.category". Therefore, if both these terms are associated with one field, then unique glossary colors and icons make the terms visually distinct from each other.

When a glossary name is updated, the changes are reflected for all users.

Perform the following steps to edit a glossary:

Procedure

  1. Click Glossary in the left navigation menu.

    The Business Glossary page opens.
  2. Select the glossary term you want to edit.

  3. (Optional) In the Summary tab, you can click the pencil icons to change the name of the glossary or edit the glossary description.

    When finished editing, click the check mark icon to accept the change or the X icon to cancel the change.
  4. (Optional) To change the glossary color and icon, click Change on the Style panel.

    The Style window appears.
    1. Click the arrow in the Select Color field and choose a color to use for the glossary.

    2. Select an icon to use for the glossary.

      You can scroll through the list or enter a keyword in the Select Icon box to locate an icon.
    3. Click Save.

    All the terms in the glossary are now identified with the color and icon.

Delete a glossary

All glossaries created by users can be deleted. Glossaries maintained by Data Catalog (such as Built-in_Terms) cannot be deleted.

AttentionDeleting a glossary removes it from the user roles. This action cannot be undone.

Perform the following steps to delete a glossary:

Procedure

  1. Click Glossary in the left navigation menu.

    The Business Glossary page opens.
  2. Select the glossary term you want to delete.

  3. At the bottom of the left navigation pane, click Actions and then select Remove from the menu that appears.

  4. In the confirmation window that appears, type yes in the Please Confirm field and click Confirm to delete the selected glossary.

Results

The glossary is deleted.