About this demo
This resource provides a comprehensive template for building and maintaining glossaries in Atlan, ensuring that terms, categories, and linked assets are consistent, clear, and useful across the organization. It includes best practices, rules, and examples that teams can adapt to their own glossary creation and governance processes.
The guide begins with glossary-level guidance, explaining how to name glossaries so they are high-level, distinct, and descriptive. It emphasizes consistent formatting (all lowercase except proper nouns and acronyms) and the importance of pluralization where appropriate (pages 1–2). It also outlines governance steps, recommending that only admins add new glossaries, while ensuring each glossary has assigned owners, experts, and meaningful descriptions that provide examples beyond just the title (page 3).
Next, it introduces categories, which group related terms within glossaries. Categories should strike a balance between specificity and generality, be plural where possible, and align with both the glossary and its terms. The guide warns against unnecessary complexity when using subcategories, recommending restraint to avoid navigation difficulties and maintenance overhead (pages 4–6).
The terms section details how to define and add new terms, highlighting the need for familiar, singular names and clear processes to prevent duplication (page 6). It also introduces related terms, explaining how synonyms, classifications, and other relationships can be used to increase clarity. Finally, it covers linked assets, which allow glossary terms to connect directly to SQL assets, tables, or models. This creates stronger alignment between business definitions and the data powering them, enabling users to understand not just the meaning of a term but also the data sources behind it (page 8).
By following this template, organizations can create glossaries that serve as a shared language, reduce ambiguity, and bridge the gap between business and technical teams. It provides the foundation for building a trustworthy, collaborative, and well-governed knowledge base in Atlan.