Key terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Application | Exploiting, manipulating or exposing data, an application can be a software, a service, a report or any other document. It can serve business processes and be subject to rules. |
| Asset | Any container or provider of structured data to be referenced and documented. An asset can itself be composed of assets. For instance, an Excel file is an asset containing sheets which are themselves as many assets containing tables then columns, lines and cells, also considered as assets that can be fed by one or many assets and feed one or more assets via a technical flow. It is contained or exposed by an instance of a system. |
| Business Process | A collection of related activities or tasks that, once they are completed in a specific sequence, produce value to the business in the form of a product or a service for a particular customer or user. |
| Business Term | Word or phrase that describes a concept used in a particular branch or domain. Business terms are governed and communicated in the business glossary. |
| Data element | An atomic unit of data that has a precise meaning or precise semantics. It can represent a complex object such as a "Customer" or a "Product" but it can also define a simple value such as a "Birth date" or a "First name". A data element can then be composed of simpler data elements. A Customer is composed of a "Person" itself composed of a "First name" and other data elements. A data element can also have a relations with other data elements. |
| Dataset | A collection of data of the same structure and defining a population of the same data element or set of data elements. A dataset can be an exhaustive list of countries or a list of French customers aged 18-24. In these 2 examples, we have a natural link between the data set and one high level data element which are respectively Country or Customer. However, it can be more complex or less natural, such as a list of product entries from an ERP which can represents different data elements with the same structures for technical convenience. |
| Environment | Any application can exist in or on many environments for different reasons. It can be due to a geographical organization where an application must be redundant for non-functional requirements. It can also be due to the business or structural organization where the segregation of duties implies the creation of many separated environments. But most likely, it is required for the build and configuration of the application that needs to be tested and qualified before to go to production. An environment is then composed of all the system instances its architecture relies on. |
| Flow | Between two applications, data exchanges are defined as many flows with their sources and targets. Staying at a logical level to be precised and materialized by technical flows, it specifies its non-functional requirements and any information that could help understand or build them. |
| Group | Group of persons, includes users of the application as well as non-users, but all persons of the group are meant to have a role in the management of data: dataset owner, system manager, etc. Examples of groups are: Marketing group, IT group, etc. Identifying this group of persons will be used to assign them the ownership of a documented object, e.g.: system, instance, etc. The responsibilities linked to the management of the various objects are also linked to groups. |
| Infrastructure | Foundation or frameworks that supports systems. It is composed of physical or logical resources that support storage, processing, analysis and exchanges of data. An infrastructure is in most case a physical or virtual server running an operating system. |
| Instance | Concrete installation of a given system, it can be the installation of a software, a file system, a service provided by a service provider, an internal service, or any other container of provider of data assets or components of any application. It runs on an infrastructure. |
| Link | It materializes the relation between two data elements in data assets. It then defines how the links between two assets are ensured in the containing system. It can be a database foreign key, an hyperlink, or just a code or any other technical representation. |
| Relation | Linking two data elements, it makes one the representation of the other. It defines why the data elements are related and in which conditions. It can also carry rules. There can be many relationships between two same data elements. A "Company" can be both the "Supplier" and the "Customer" of another "Company". As different rules can apply to these two cases, it is interesting to be able to create two different relations instead of one with a multiple condition. |
| Role | This is not the definition of users roles within TIBCO Cloud Metadata but roles upon data in the information system. A role is not necessary active on data governance or data management but can define, for instance, a passive notified role. Each element of a RACI matrix can then be defined as a role given to a list of groups of persons. |
| Rule | Defines or limits some aspects of a given data category to control or influence the behavior of business data. It is used for making decisions and for governing programs or policies. |
| Provider | Any company providing one or many systems. It can be a software vendor, a system integrator or any other outsourcing company, but it can also be an internal organization. |
| System | Any technical component that participates to the elaboration of an application, but also any technical component that provides or uses data. A system is then materialized by an instance. |
| Technical Flow | A data aims to be used but is also sourced. It then comes from an origin going though intermediaries to reach a final destination before reaching another in the future. Each step in this journey that is a flow between two or many applications is a technical flow. It defines the bridge between two assets, telling at any level what is the source of any target. |