Glossary: Gathering Context from the Glossary

Name: Glossary: Gathering Context from the Glossary
Uploaded: 2025-09-23T17:40:07.348Z
Duration: 1 min 38 s
Description: Empower data users with Atlan's glossary feature, providing clear context, calculations, and FAQs for confident data analysis without bothering producers.

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Transcript

2 min

00:00 — Searching for a column with an unclear description
-Converted In this second use case, we will dive into educating and empowering consumers. With Atlan, users that are not owners of the data can feel confident in using data. We start as a data analyst creating a new dashboard. We know that we are trying to create a dashboard that gives insights into reordering information from clients. One key metric that we need and we'll use for analysis is the day since prior order. However, we cannot remember how this is calculated, where it may be valid or not valid. First, we find the column in our presentation layer.
We enter in the value of day since prior order, click on the asset filter and select columns to limit our search to only that asset type and looking at the description, it doesn't tell us everything that we need. We don't know when it is null, how the calculation is done. And this causes us immediately to want to reach out to the data producer. However, we noticed that there is a days since prior order term. Clicking on it brings us to the term page, which not only has a more in depth description, but also has a full readme.
01:00 — Finding answers on the term page and readme
As we look into it, not only does it give us the actual calculation, but gives us a full business understanding of how it is calculating. We can even see the answer to our no value question right in the frequently asked questions section. We now can be confident in using this metric for our dashboard without having to bother anyone. By having this information defined, we saved our data producer time by not having to answer our question. Along with keeping those questions from coming in the future.

About this demo

See how glossary terms in Atlan provide deeper context and business meaning for metrics and fields. This example shows how terms like “days since prior order” enrich dashboards by answering calculation and null value questions. With glossary context, consumers gain confidence while producers save time on repeated explanations.