Navigating the Data Jungle: Catalogs, Glossaries, and Dictionaries Explored

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with our friends at Dataversity and Bob Seiner, President & Principal of KIK Consulting & Educational Services to explore practical strategies for implementing data catalogs, business glossaries, and data dictionaries to improve organizational data management.

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Check it out!

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Webinar Transcript

Mark: Hello and welcome! My name is Mark Horseman, a Data Evangelist with Data Verity. We’d like to thank you for joining the current installment of the monthly Data Verity webinar series, Real World Data Governance with Bob Seiner. Today, Bob will discuss navigating the data jungle—catalogs, glossaries, and dictionaries. We’re sponsored by Metaphor.

Just a few points to get us started: Due to the large number of attendees, you will be muted during the webinar. If you’d like to chat with us or each other, we encourage you to do so. Zoom chat defaults to sending messages to the panelists, but feel free to switch that to network with everyone. For questions, we’ll be collecting them in the Q&A section. The icons for the chat and Q&A panels are at the bottom of your screen. As always, we’ll send a follow-up email within a couple of business days with links to the slides, the recording, and any additional information requested.

Now, let me pass it to Kirit from Metaphor. Kirit, take it away!

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Kirit: Thank you, Mark! I’m going to share my screen. Can everyone see it?

Audience: Yes, we can see it.

Kirit: Perfect! I’m really excited to talk to you all today and hear Bob’s presentation. I’m Kirit, the Head of Product at Metaphor Data. We are a social platform for data, and if you’re wondering what that means, let me tell you a story to set it up.

In the early days of building this product, we talked to C-level execs at various companies. When we mentioned we were building a catalog, their response was often, “Why? Catalogs are where data goes to die.” They’d paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for expensive catalogs, spent months training staff, and then found that no one except the data team used them.

That’s why we built Metaphor—to make a catalog useful to everyone in the company, not just the data team. Sure, the data team gets value, but we also cater to analysts and business users. For example, business users can ask questions like, “How do we define this term?” and get answers without needing extensive training on the tool.

Let me walk you through our core features briefly:

1. Search and Discovery: This is our bread and butter. We support both traditional and AI-based search capabilities.

2. Data Governance: We help customers across the spectrum—from those just modernizing their data warehouses to those at the cutting edge with data mesh architectures.

3. Data Literacy: We make documenting data easy and fun, using institutional knowledge capture to create meaningful documentation without burdening the users.

Now, I’ll quickly preview our tool, starting with Slack. Imagine your business users asking, “What’s the definition of X?” Our natural language search scours the catalog’s metadata and provides an answer, like a glossary term or a data contact.

In long conversations—like ones happening in Slack—our tool can summarize and persist key information into the catalog. So, institutional knowledge is never lost, and minimal training is required to get started.

On the technical side, you’ll see metadata like column-level lineage and data quality, but more importantly, users can engage in conversations and persist knowledge instantly, thanks to our integrated AI.

To sum it up, our goal is to make data catalogs, glossaries, and dictionaries useful, accessible, and engaging to everyone, with as little friction as possible.

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Mark: Thanks so much, Kirit! Now, I’d like to introduce our main speaker for the series, Bob Seiner. Bob is the President and Principal of KIK Consulting and Educational Services and Publisher Emeritus of the Data Administration Newsletter (TDAN.com). Bob has been awarded the DMA Professional Award for significant contributions to the data management industry, and he specializes in non-invasive data governance, data stewardship, and metadata management.

Bob, the floor is yours!

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Bob: Hello and welcome! Thanks to Mark, Kirit, and Metaphor for sponsoring today’s webinar. Can everyone hear me and see my screen?

Audience: Yes!

Bob: Great! Let’s dive in. Today’s topic—navigating the data jungle—is a personal favorite of mine. Back in the day, I was known as "Mr. Metadata." It wasn’t always a compliment because metadata repositories were considered tedious. But we didn’t even call them data catalogs back then! The terms "glossaries" and "dictionaries" were around, but now we have the tools to make them much more useful.

We’ll talk about data catalogs, business glossaries, and data dictionaries. I’ll explain how these tools work together, how to unlock their value, and how to help organizations become more effective in their use.

Key topics:

1. Data Catalogs: These are digital libraries that store various types of metadata. They help users navigate data silos and identify valuable data assets.

2. Business Glossaries: These define business terms and ensure consistency across the organization. They bridge communication gaps between departments.

3. Data Dictionaries: These are more technical and relate to how data elements are defined within systems. They link business terms to actual data in databases.

Let’s begin with data catalogs. Often, organizations assume that simply having a catalog is the solution to data governance. It’s not. The catalog is an enabler, but governance involves strategy and alignment with business goals. Catalogs help map your data terrain, identify hidden data treasures, and increase confidence in your data.

But selecting the right tool is crucial. You need to align the capabilities of the catalog with your organization’s business requirements. Ensure the tool integrates seamlessly, and that the data in the catalog is relevant and up-to-date.

Next, we’ll talk about glossaries. A good glossary defines key business terms and helps foster a unified language across the organization. Getting stakeholders involved in building the glossary is essential—it’s not something one person can do alone. This collaboration helps bridge communication gaps and ensures consistency across departments.

Now, let’s discuss data dictionaries. These are often hidden in spreadsheets or scattered across systems. When integrated with a catalog, they provide critical context for business terms and their definitions. This integration helps users navigate from high-level terms down to the technical details they need.

Finally, we’ll explore how to synergize these tools for greater value. When integrated, the sum of the catalog, glossary, and dictionary is greater than their parts. It enhances discoverability, usability, and decision-making across the organization.

To wrap up, I’ll share some examples of how organizations have successfully navigated their data jungle. By using catalogs, glossaries, and dictionaries together, they’ve improved data quality, consistency, and overall business decision-making.

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Mark: Thank you so much, Bob! We have a lot of questions, but unfortunately, we’re running short on time. We’ll follow up with answers and resources in our post-webinar email. Thanks to everyone for attending today, and have a great day!

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About Metaphor

The Metaphor Metadata Platform represents the next evolution of the Data Catalog - it combines best in class Technical Metadata (learnt from building DataHub at LinkedIn) with Behavioral and Social Metadata. It supercharges an organization’s ability to democratize data with state of the art capabilities for Data Governance, Data Literacy and Data Enablement, and provides an extremely intuitive user interface that turns even the most non-technical user into a fan of the catalog. See Metaphor in action today!