IBM InfoSphere Business Glossary

Business Glossary, Business Glossary browser, and Business Glossary Anywhere support complex enterprise development environments with a unique set of capabilities:

• Manage business terms and categories: Business Glossary provides a dedicated, Web-based user interface for creating, managing, and sharing a controlled vocabulary. Terms represent the major information concepts in your enterprise and categories are used to organize into hierarchies.

• Manage stewardship: Stewards are people or organizations with responsibility for a given information asset. Using Business Glossary administrators can import steward profiles from external sources, generate and edit profiles in the Web interface, and create relationships of responsibility between stewards and business terms or any of the artifacts managed by IBM InfoSphere Information Server.

• Customize and extend: Needs around business metadata tend to differ from one enterprise to the next. For this reason, there is no "one size fits all" meta-model. In addition to being able to customize the entry page to the application, administrators can extend the application with custom attributes on both business categories and business terms.

• Collaborate: It is not enough to simply document business metadata. This information is active in the enterprise with open access to all members of business and development teams. IBM InfoSphere Business Glossary provides a collaborative environment in which users can evolve this important information asset as the business changes and adapts to market conditions, shifting customer needs and competitive threats.

• Contextual search and visibility business term definitions: Business Glossary Anywhere is an application independent search / pop-up box that can be called from any application (Excel, data modeling tools, reporting applications, Microsoft Word, etc.) that provides instant access to Business Glossary terms, taxonomies and stewards.

• Simply Browse: Business Glossary browser is an intuitive read-only web-based interface requiring no training to utilize. Business users can search and explore the common controlled vocabulary and relationships, identify stewards responsible for assets and provide direct feedback.
  Contextual search and visibility business term definitions: Business Glossary Anywhere is an application independent search / pop-up box that can be called from any application (Excel, data modeling tools, reporting applications, Microsoft Word, etc.) that provides instant access to Business Glossary terms, taxonomies and stewards.

IBM InfoSphere Business Glossary, Business Glossary browser and Business Glossary Anywhere provide these benefits:

• Stronger data governance: Users can take ownership of business metadata by importing terms from external sources, authoring and editing terms in the Web interface, classifying terms into categories, and relating terms to more technical artifacts managed by the IBM InfoSphere Information Server.

• Accountability and responsibility can be assigned, supporting enterprise data governance and Electronically Stored Information (ESI) requirements.

• Improved productivity: Administrators can tailor the tool to the needs of their business users.

• Increased collaboration: users are able to add annotations to business terms and categories as well so other team members downstream in project cycles have a greater understanding of the context of information.

• Greater trust in information: business users now have immediate, in-context access to terms and definitions, facilitating a greater understand of and trust in the information they rely on to make critical business decisions.