InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog tasks

You can use IBM® InfoSphere® Information Governance Catalog to create a catalog of assets to help users understand the business meaning of the assets in your enterprise.

Your organization can use InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog to complete the following tasks:

Browse and search for terms and categories

To understand the meaning of business terms as defined in the enterprise, users can browse and search for terms and categories in the catalog.

For example, an analyst might want to find out how the term "Accepted Flag Type" is defined in his business. The analyst can use InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog or IBM InfoSphere Glossary Anywhere to find the definition of the term, its usage, and other terms related to it. The analyst can also find out what information governance rules and information assets are related to the term and can find out details about these assets.

Develop and share a common vocabulary between business and technology

A common vocabulary gives diverse users a common understanding of business concepts, improving communication and efficiency.

For example, one department in an organization might use the word "customer," a second department might use the word "user," and a third department might use the word "client," all to describe the same type of individual. You can use InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog to capture these terms, define their meaning, create relationships between them and consolidate terminology to achieve increased precision in communications. Other users can refer to this information at any time.

Associate business information with information assets

Glossary authors can attach business meaning to information assets by assigning them to terms and information governance rules.

Information assets, such as database columns, database tables, or schemas that reside in the InfoSphere Information Server metadata repository, can be shared with other InfoSphere Information Server products. As a result, users of InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog can view information about these asset. They can also associate the assets with terms or rules that are defined in the catalog.

Develop and share a common set of information governance policies and rules

Information governance policies and rules give team members a common understanding of business requirements or objectives and an understanding of how to manage assets to comply with those requirements or objectives.

By defining information governance policies and information governance rules in InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog, users can share business requirements and objectives and describe how assets comply with those requirements and objectives with the appropriate members of your enterprise. The integration capabilities between information governance rules, operational rules, and information assets close the loop between declared business objectives and implemented data governance.

After information governance rules are defined, they can be associated with runtime data rules, such as archiving rules, data quality rules, security rules, and data standardization rules. In addition, information governance rules can be associated with terms and with information assets such as databases, database tables, database columns and model objects. Within InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog, you can specify the type of relationship that the information governance rule has to the information asset. For example, you can specify whether the information governance rule is implemented by an information asset. You can also specify the inverse relationship to indicate that an information asset implements a particular information governance rule. In addition, you can specify that a rule governs an asset, or that an asset is governed by a rule.

View relationships between glossary assets and other assets

In addition to learning about the relationships between glossary assets and other information assets, users can also view business lineage reports to discover how data flows among information assets.

InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog provides information about the flow of data among information assets. For example, a lineage report might show the flow of data from one database table to another database table, and from there to another report.

You can create queries to discover specific assets that are used by different InfoSphere Information Server components. Queries can be published and made available to other users in your organization.

Analyze dependencies and relationships

Analyzing dependencies and relationships between assets helps you to understand where data originates, how it relates to other data, and what types of processing the data undergoes throughout the project lifecycle.

You can create data lineage reports, business lineage reports, and impact analysis reports to visualize relationships. Data lineage reports help you understand where data comes from and where it goes. Business lineage reports show less detailed reports, excluding detailed information that business users do not need.

Manage metadata

You can create and edit descriptions for assets in the InfoSphere Information Server metadata repository. These changes proliferate through the metadata repository so that other suite users have access to the most current metadata.

You can also extend data lineage to external processes that do not write to disk, or ETL tools, scripts, and other programs that do not save their metadata in the metadata repository. You can create and import extended assets, and then use these assets in extension mapping documents to track the flow of information to and from the extended data sources and other assets.