Introduction

In Blindata the Business Glossary is more than just a list of business terms—it serves as the foundation for defining your organization’s shared vocabulary. By connecting terms to their underlying concepts and relationships, it facilitates a deeper understanding of data in its proper context. This approach turns isolated data points into a structured, navigable knowledge graph, ensuring that data is reusable and understood across distributed systems.

At its core, the ontology-driven framework ensures that data remains consistent, composable, and aligned with the business, helping to foster a knowledge-driven culture within your organization.

In computer science, an ontology organizes knowledge by defining concepts and their relationships using a “subject-predicate-object” triple. For example, in a business ontology, you might have:

• Subject: “Customer”
• Predicate: “purchases”
• Object: “Product”

This triple captures the relationship between a customer and a product through the action of purchasing. The ontology schema further refines this by defining “Customer” as a class of data, representing a type or category of entity, and specifying its attributes (e.g., name, email). Similarly, “Product” is also a class with attributes like price and category. This structured approach ensures that each element, such as “Customer” and “Product,” is clearly defined and understood within the overall data model.

Depending on your organization’s maturity level and goals, you can use the Business Glossary in several ways:

• As a collection of business terms: Begin by cataloging key terms and linking them to their relevant concepts (e.g., ‘firstName’ as a term associated with the concept ‘Person’).
• As taxonomies of business entities: Organize your glossary to categorize entities such as ‘Person,’ ‘Customer,’ ‘Employee,’ ‘StoreStaff,’ and ‘AdministrationStaff,’ providing a structured hierarchy of business concepts.
• As a full ontology: Go beyond simple terms and taxonomies by modeling the relationships between concepts. This allows you to create a comprehensive ontology that defines how these entities interact and relate to one another within your business domain.

No matter the approach, Blindata simplifies the process, managing the complexities behind the scenes so you can focus on creating meaningful business definitions.

How to use the Business Glossary

You can choose from multiple methods to define and manage your Business Glossary:

1. Manual Entry via UI or Spreadsheet Upload
   Users can manually catalog terms and concepts using Blindata’s user interface or by uploading spreadsheets to bulk-import information.

2. Automated Entry via API
   Leverage Blindata’s API to manage Namespaces, Concepts, Attributes, Relations, and Predicates programmatically, enabling integration with custom applications or external tools.

3. Ontology Graph Editor
   Use Blindata’s visual graph editor to define new concepts and relationships. The editor allows you to intuitively organize concepts by namespace and visualize the relationships between terms, simplifying the creation and management of complex data ontologies.

4. TURTLE File Import
   For more advanced users, Blindata supports importing ontologies through TURTLE files. You can define Namespaces, Concepts, Attributes, and their relationships in a structured format that seamlessly integrates into the platform.

For detailed instructions, refer to the specific sections of this guide.

Glossary of Key Terms

Here are some common terms used throughout this guide: