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Glossary terms in Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog are active values that provide context. They also apply policies that determine how you manage, govern, and make your data discoverable for use.
If you already use Microsoft Purview, you're familiar with the business glossary in general. It provides a vocabulary for business users. It consists of business terms that can be related to each other and allows them to be categorized so that they can be understood in different contexts. This structure helps abstract the technical jargon associated with the data repositories and allows the business user to discover and work with data in the vocabulary that is more familiar to them.
Microsoft Purview takes these terms a step further by allowing them to play an active role in data governance. Now data stewards can use terms to apply policies and scale data governance as their data estate grows.
What is a glossary term?
Terms are individual concepts that define the business, processes, and systems used in an organization. You can apply them across a data estate, relating to data assets and data products to provide business context to your users. A technically named SQL table becomes less mysterious once it's linked to your "Account" business term, since users can immediately see what aspect of the business it's related to.
Create glossary terms under governance domains to impart context specific to each part of your organization. Both sales and marketing might use the same term to mean different things, and your governance domains help your team differentiate between those meanings.
Once created, terms map to data products to provide context for those data products and to provide specific data governance based on business context. It's easy to understand how a term and its definition provide business context to a data product, but how do they provide data governance? Terms are an active part of Microsoft Purview that provide data governance by now containing policies.
Policies in a business term apply specific business health goals, data governance requirements, and terms of use to any data product that you apply the term to. We're excited to introduce the different kinds of policies that are available within a term, so be on the lookout for our updates.
How does this scale data governance?
Glossary terms were previously static terms that you applied to define a concept. But now they can be activated as objects that attach to policies that determine how you manage, govern, and make your data discoverable for use. Terms for data access and data health controls can trickle down to data products. Today data stewards apply policies on single data objects. That's not scalable. Now a data steward can create a single term and create its policies. They might not know where to apply that term, but any time they apply the term to a data product, all the associated policies are automatically applied. Active terms allow your data estate to naturally scale, and maintain security and discoverability without burying your data stewards in a mire.