Business Glossary in 2025: Definition, Examples & Common Challenges

Updated December 06th, 2024

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A business glossary is a centralized collection of standardized terms and definitions used within an organization. It clarifies key business concepts, promotes consistent communication, and enhances data governance.

By aligning terminology across teams, it ensures accuracy, supports compliance, and improves decision-making.

A business glossary serves as a single source of truth for business-critical information, fostering clarity and collaboration in data management.

By centralizing terminology, a business glossary fosters accuracy, transparency, and efficient data management.

Table of Contents #

What is a business glossary?
Who is responsible for the business glossary?
Business Glossary Examples: What does a business glossary include?
Five common business glossary challenges
How to use crowdsourcing to improve your business glossary
How organizations making the most out of their data using Atlan
Summing up on Business Glossary
FAQs about business glossary
What is business glossary: Related reads

What is a business glossary? #

A business glossary can be defined as a collection of unique business terms and definitions that helps understand the data assets’ key characteristics.
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Business glossary

Business glossary Source: Atlan.

Also, A business glossary makes data discoverability easier for businesses because it consists of popular business terms rather than IT keywords.

Unlike traditional glossaries, business users own the responsibility of building and maintaining a business glossary.

Since it helps create a common data language across an organization, building a business glossary is a crucial step toward data democratization. A business glossary is also referred to as a data glossary.

Creating a business glossary and data glossary is not an easy task. Maintaining and regularly enriching it is even more difficult. However, crowdsourcing the work of linking terms to data can make a business glossary more alive and easier to maintain.

Who is responsible for the Business glossary? #

A dedicated group of people from the business should be responsible for maintaining the business glossary, adding new terms, and enriching the existing ones.

How to use taxonomy fundamentals to design your business glossary?

Download ebook → A Guide to Building a Business Case for a Data Catalog

Business Glossary Examples: What does a business glossary include? #

The key objective of a business glossary is to build an open knowledge base of business terms, concepts, and metrics.

The prevalence and the use of inconsistent terminology adversely affect data discovery, accessibility, and the correct usage of data assets.

For example, if we run a search for a business term like “customer acquisition cost", this business glossary example would give you information about:

The short definition of the term, concept, and metric
A README section that goes in-depth into describing the term. In this case, it tells us the way the metric is calculated, the data assets involved in the calculation, what are the other places where this term is used, and what are the other terms that are related to it.
It also gives us information about the owners, subject matter experts, classification, and verification/validity status of the term.

business glossary example

An example business glossary. Source: Atlan.

linking a glossary term with a data asset

View all the data assets that are related to the business glossary term. Source: Atlan.

Five Common Business Glossary Challenges #

Everybody hailing from the data world understands the significance of a business glossary and has even invested in building one. Who doesn’t want a clean list of unique business terms defining the contents of each data table?!

Here are five business glossary challenges that prevent organizations from realizing their full value of it.

Labor-intensive to build
Challenging to standardize
Difficult to update
Far away from the actual data
Missing domain expertise

1. Labor-intensive to build #

Building a business glossary takes time and effort. Whether it is created in Excel or fed into a glossary management system, it takes time to develop unique business glossary terms and define them for each data table.

Here is a list of business glossary tools by DBMS Tools to help you build, maintain, and share business glossaries inside your organization.

2. Challenging to standardize #

A business glossary must follow a standard structure. It should have a consistent hierarchy based on the general nature of data in the organization. The challenge is to keep the structure generic enough to incorporate glossary terms from multiple domains like finance, HR, sales, etc.

3. Difficult to update #

It is essential to keep enriching and updating a business glossary. Unless it is up to date with new glossary terms and definitions, the users will not trust it and hence not use it.

A dedicated group of people from the business should be responsible for maintaining the business glossary, adding new terms, and enriching the existing ones.

Read this article by the open-source community about how to iterate on your business glossary collaboratively.

4. Far away from the actual data #

Usually, the business glossary system is built and stored away from the data. This makes the business glossary a non-interactive, static repository. Ideally, business glossary terms should be attached to each data set — this makes search faster and data easier to understand.

5. Missing domain expertise #

The people responsible for building the business glossary cannot know everything about every data set. They may lack domain expertise or contextual information, which leads to incomplete glossary terms and inaccurate linking of glossary terms to data.

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How to use crowdsourcing to improve your business glossary #

The challenges above clearly show two things. First, the business glossary and the data have to be linked together. Second, the people who know the most about data should be able to recommend glossary terms.

A business glossary must act, in part, like a shared data workspace that enables: #

Creating, updating, and maintaining the definitions and descriptions of business and functional terms.
Attaching appropriate business glossary terms to the respective data assets.
Validating and approving the integrity/quality of the definitions
Identifying the owner/subject matter expert and initiating conversations with them
Building a governance model by proving user roles and by protecting sensitive information
Auditing all the changes — who, what, when — made to a glossary term

crowdsource business glossary

Crowdsource managing a business glossary. Source: Atlan.

chat conversations with data owners

Initiate chat conversations with data owners. Source: Atlan.

Pro Tip: Auto-glossary suggestions by an AI powered bot is also proving to be useful in reducing the manual work of linking glossary terms to each data table.

However, the crowdsourcing process should be centrally managed to maintain the business glossary’s hygiene. The data users should create requests to link existing glossary terms to the data, and the stewards or admins should approve or reject the request. This will keep the glossary creation process iterative and robust.

How organizations making the most out of their data using Atlan #

The recently published Forrester Wave report compared all the major enterprise data catalogs and positioned Atlan as the market leader ahead of all others. The comparison was based on 24 different aspects of cataloging, broadly across the following three criteria:

Automatic cataloging of the entire technology, data, and AI ecosystem
Enabling the data ecosystem AI and automation first
Prioritizing data democratization and self-service

These criteria made Atlan the ideal choice for a major audio content platform, where the data ecosystem was centered around Snowflake. The platform sought a “one-stop shop for governance and discovery,” and Atlan played a crucial role in ensuring their data was “understandable, reliable, high-quality, and discoverable.”

For another organization, Aliaxis, which also uses Snowflake as their core data platform, Atlan served as “a bridge” between various tools and technologies across the data ecosystem. With its organization-wide business glossary, Atlan became the go-to platform for finding, accessing, and using data. It also significantly reduced the time spent by data engineers and analysts on pipeline debugging and troubleshooting.

A key goal of Atlan is to help organizations maximize the use of their data for AI use cases. As generative AI capabilities have advanced in recent years, organizations can now do more with both structured and unstructured data—provided it is discoverable and trustworthy, or in other words, AI-ready.

Tide, a UK-based digital bank with nearly 500,000 small business customers, sought to improve their compliance with GDPR’s Right to Erasure, commonly known as the “Right to be forgotten”.
After adopting Atlan as their metadata platform, Tide’s data and legal teams collaborated to define personally identifiable information in order to propagate those definitions and tags across their data estate.
Tide used Atlan Playbooks (rule-based bulk automations) to automatically identify, tag, and secure personal data, turning a 50-day manual process into mere hours of work.

Book your personalized demo today to find out how Atlan can help your organization in establishing and scaling data governance programs.

Summing up on business glossary #

A business glossary is vital to lay the grounds for data governance in an organization.

Crowdsourcing business glossary terms, along with a centrally administered approval mechanism, keeps your business glossary useful and data democratized. It allows human tribal knowledge to flow within the data system without messing up its centralized structure and hygiene.

If you are evaluating a business glossary tool for your team, do take Atlan for a spin - Atlan is more than a business glossary solution, it is a collaborative metadata management and data catalog tool that enables a shared understanding of data.

FAQs about business glossary #

1. What is a business glossary? #

A business glossary is a centralized repository of business terms and definitions that help organizations understand their data. It standardizes terminology across teams, ensuring consistency in data interpretation and usage.

2. Why is a business glossary important for organizations? #

It fosters consistent communication, minimizes misinterpretations of data, and improves decision-making by providing clear definitions of key business terms. This helps align organizational strategies and operational processes.

3. How do you create a business glossary? #

Creating a business glossary involves identifying critical business terms, defining them with input from relevant stakeholders, and organizing them in a centralized platform. Regular updates and stakeholder collaboration are key to maintaining its relevance.

4. What is the difference between a business glossary and a data dictionary? #

A business glossary focuses on business terms and their definitions, while a data dictionary provides technical details about data assets, such as data types and structures.

5. How does a business glossary improve data governance? #

By defining terms clearly and standardizing data usage, a business glossary enhances data quality, accountability, and compliance, forming a foundation for robust data governance practices.