This section examines the differences and relation between the conceptual data layer and the Collibra Business Glossary.
Business terms: context-dependent representations of business concepts
In short, the Business Glossary is a system that helps organizations govern their business terms.
Example Let's consider the business term Customer, within a multinational consumer goods organization that deals with different consumer groups in different cultural contexts. This organization uses business terms to create a shared understanding of Customer, across different geographical regions. Its offices around the world create their own business terms to encapsulate the specific cultural complexity of a customer, in their own way. Its various business units also have their own definitions, to address different operational, legal and compliance demands.
Business terms are a flexible tool that account for complex business and organizational structures. Anything can be represented by a business term, including the nuanced representations specific to different languages, cultures and branches of business.
Data, on the other hand, can be more explicitly defined and grouped. While there may be several ways to describe Customer, based on cultural and geographic nuance, when we consider data, a customer can be uniquely identified, defined and grouped. This is where the conceptual data layer comes in.
The conceptual data layer: context-independent representation of the structure of data
A data domain is a container for other data domains and data concepts that encompass associated terminology and definitions that an organization intends to govern.
Example Customer Master Data, Product Master Data, Reference Data
While business terms represent Customer in the context of a specific language, culture or branch of business, a customer data domain represents the structure of Customer in a data environment, and encapsulates all of the different nuances of the business term. By abstracting the idea of Customer in a data domain, one can start to consider how customers can be represented by physical data.
The same applies to data concepts, such as Year, Date, Address, and Name. While there may be many business terms that represent Year, across different teams and geographies, the data concept encapsulates all of them and creates a layer of abstraction that allows you to define high-level data structures.