Data Glossaries

Data glossaries provide documentation of consistent meaning for data shared among different information systems, programs, and functional areas throughout the University. Definitions and other “data about data” provide data integrity, accuracy and consistency, clarify ambiguous meanings, minimize redundant data, and document business rules. These data glossaries help the University to move from “project-based” data files to “enterprise” data files – and vice versa. In other words, the data become usable to more than just the project or person that created the data, because you know the data will be in an expected format and you know what is represented by the data.