Glossary Terms

🗂️ What is a Business Glossary?
A Glossary is a list of terms, organized in a way to help users understand the context of their data assets. For example, terms like "cost", "pandl", "revenue", etc, can be used to group and search all financial data assets.
The use of familiar terminology helps in quickly understanding the data and its background. It is a crucial element of data governance as it helps in bringing the business understanding closer to an organization's data initiatives.
On the Atlan product, glossary terms can be attached to any data asset and can be leveraged to power quick and easy data discovery.
Feature highlights of Atlan Glossary
🔍 Powers search and ease the discoverability of data assets.
🔖 Incentivizes the creation, maintenance, and enrichment of business and functional terms consistently due to its direct and visible use in enabling search.
👩 👨 Allows organizations to crowdsource the task of attaching appropriate glossary terms to data assets.
🤖 Supports automated metadata management through auto-glossary suggestions powered by the Atlan Bot.
🏛️ The Anatomy of Glossary inside Atlan
Atlan gives users an option to build glossaries in a hierarchical fashion. Glossary term is the lowest unit that can exist independently inside a glossary or can be grouped within categories.
✨ Spotlight: This structure allows for glossaries from multiple domains to co-exist.
Let's look at how terms and categories work together to build a glossary.
🏷️ Term:
A term is the lowest unit which is unique inside each glossary.
It describes the content of the data assets in the most useful and precise way.
It can exist independently, without belonging to any particular category or sub-category.
✨ Spotlight: A term can also be used on the discover page to quickly filter data assets.
Gloassary term page on Atlan
📁 Category:
A category is used to group the terms of a similar context together. it is just a way of organizing terms.
🌟 Pro Tip: You can also add sub-categories within your categories to provide more context to the glossary.
Categories and sub-categories inside glossary
🛠️ A step-by-step guide to set-up your glossary inside Atlan
STEP 1: Add a new glossary
1.Go to the Glossary tab.
2.Click on the + Add button, given in blue (on the bottom left of the screen).
3.A modal will open where you will have to give your glossary a name and an appropriate description to define what it is.
Add a new glossary
STEP 2 {Optional but recommended 🤓 }: Add a category inside your newly created Glossary
1.Click on the ellipsis next to the glossary name and select the option to add a new category.
2.Add a name and description to your category for better understanding.
👉 Example: To add another layer of context inside "Health Care" glossary, create a category COVID-19 before adding terms.
How to add a category
STEP 3 {Just Optional 😃 } : Add a sub-category
1.Click on the ellipsis next to the category name and select the option to add a new sub-category.
👉 Example: Inside the COVID-19 category, you can go a level deeper and create a sub-category named WHO, which will include all glossary terms linked to data released by WHO.
Create a sub-category
STEP 4 {It's a must ✔️ }: Create terms
1.Click on the ellipsis next to the category or sub-category name and select the option to add a new term.
2.Give it an appropriate name and description.
🧙‍♂️ Remember: The term will be used to recognize and filter the data assets. Hence, keep it short and precise.
Filter assets using glossary terms
🌟 Pro Tip: You can also add a README for each term to add more details about it.
STEP 5 (We won't let you forget that 📎 }: Link your data assets with appropriate glossary terms.
Just click on the data asset listed on the discovery tab, to open its profile on the right side. There only an option to add Glossary terms is given. You can also go to an individual data asset page and add glossary terms there.
Add glossary term
You can also click on each term inside the glossary tab and click on the "Link Assets" button in blue to link the term to respective data assets.
Link assets via terms page
🚀 Superpowers
👩 👨 Crowdsource your Atlan glossary without losing its hygiene.
To know more, check out the article linked below 👇
Crowdsourcing Metadata
🤖 Auto-Glossary recommendation by Atlan Bot.
To know more, check out the article linked below 👇
Auto Glossary Suggestions
📤 Bulk glossary upload
If you already have your business glossary in place, fear not, we will not ask you to re-do the work. Atlan allows you to bulk-upload your glossary if you have it documented in a CSV.
Here's a description of the process you need to follow to do this using the templates available in Atlan:
atlan_glossary_category_template This template is used for uploading all the categories into your glossary. You'll find this template in the Glossary page (+Add > Select "Category" under Type > Upload Bulk > Download Template). The columns you'll need to populate in this template are described below:
GlossaryName: Name of the parent glossary
CategoryName: Name of the category
ShortDescription: The description that you'll see in the screen just below the Category Name
LongDescription: The description that will go into the Readme
Status: Choose any one of these available status values - NO_STATUS, VERIFIED, WORK_IN_PROGRES, ISSUE, DEPRECATED
Owner: Enter the email ID of the user who needs to own the category
Expert: Enter the email ID of the user who can be considered as an expert for the category
atlan_glossary_term_template This template is used for uploading all the terms into your glossary. You'll find this template in the Glossary page (+Add > Select "Term" under Type > Upload Bulk > Download Template). The columns you'll need to populate in this template are described below:
GlossaryName: Name of the parent glossary
TermName: Name of the glossary term
ShortDescription: The description that users will see right below the term name and above Readme
LongDescription: The description that will go into Readme
Categories: The category that the term belongs to (as in the above template)
Classifications: Any classification you want to attach to the Glossary term (This needs to be created in the Classifications tab first. Can be left blank if you want to leave this for later)
Status: Choose any one of these available status values - NO_STATUS, VERIFIED, WORK_IN_PROGRES, ISSUE, DEPRECATED
Owner: Enter the email ID of the user who needs to own the term
Expert: Enter the email ID of the user who can be considered as an expert for the term The rest of the columns are meant to provide more metadata/context. We'd recommend leaving these blank and filling in these attributes later in the UI
Here's how you can upload these templates on Atlan
Go the Glossary tab
Create a Glossary
Click on the ellipsis next to the Glossary name and select Add new category
Click on the Upload Bulk tab and Upload the filled atlan_glossary_category_upload_template CSV. The categories will now show up in the Glossary
To upload terms, click on the ellipsis next to the Glossary name and select Add new term
Click on the Upload Bulk tab and Upload the filled atlan_glossary_term_upload_template CSV