Navigate Glossary Assets
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you'll be able to:
- Describe the four types of glossary assets and their purpose.
- Navigate the Glossary tab to find Domains, Sub-Domains, Business Terms, and Metrics.
- Explore a Business Term's relationships to other assets in the catalog.
Why a Shared Vocabulary Matters
You know that Infiwave teams tend to use the same terms in different ways. The finance team defines Active Customer as someone who made a purchase in the past 12 months, but the marketing team uses 6 months. This mismatch causes conflicting quarterly reports, and Angela's manager has asked her to find the official, organization-wide definition both teams should use.
Angela navigates to the Business Glossary in CDGC. It’s the authoritative source for how Infiwave defines its business concepts.
A glossary is a reliable, accurate, managed list of terms used across an organization. It provides clear meaning and business context to terminology. When Angela searches for Customer or Revenue, she finds the agreed-upon definition, not a team-specific interpretation. You can link a glossary asset to technical assets, which enables businesses to build and manage a common business vocabulary in collaboration with IT.
One important distinction—a glossary isn’t a data dictionary. It defines business concepts—the shared language your organization uses to talk about data—not the technical structure of that data. Glossary definitions should also be system-agnostic—generic, broad, and not tied to any specific platform or tool. This ensures that "Active Customer" means the same thing whether the data lives in Salesforce, Oracle, or a spreadsheet.
Types of Glossary Assets
CDGC organizes glossary assets into four types, from broadest to most specific.
Domain
A Domain is a collection of business concepts grouped together for a specific function or requirement. It sits at the top of the glossary hierarchy and might include one or many Sub-Domains.
Common examples include finance, law, and human resources.
Sub-Domain
A Sub-Domain is a hierarchical division within a Domain that breaks it down into more specific areas.
Common examples include specifying finance to retail finance, or law to regulatory compliance.
Business Term
A Business Term refers to a business function or activity. It assigns semantic and business context to an actual business concept—and can also provide meaning to a technical asset, such as explaining what a derived or calculated column represents. At Infiwave, examples include Active Customer, Email Address, and Product Code.
When Angela finds the Email business term, she reviews its official definition, owner, lifecycle status, and which technical assets it’s linked to.
Metric
A Metric refers to the definition of a measurement of a business result—typically a numerical indicator of business success. Metrics use business logic to evaluate assets. When Angela opens a metric in CDGC, she can review the Attributes section and the formula used to calculate it.
Common examples include gross profit, average units per transaction, and compound interest.
Explore Business Term Relationships
One of the most powerful features of business terms in CDGC is the ability to review how they connect to other assets. Angela selects the Delivery Cost business term to find out which technical assets—tables, fields, reports—are associated with it, and whether a policy governs how that data should be used.
To find a specific glossary asset and explore its relationships:
- In the CDGC left panel, select Browse | Glossary.
- Browse through the pages, or use the search box within the Glossary section to jump directly to a specific term.
- Select the asset name to open its Asset 360-degree view.
- Review the Overview tab for the description, stakeholders, data quality scores, and lifecycle status.
- Navigate to the Relationships tab to review all assets the term is associated with in a graphical view.
- Select the Grid view to switch to a list view for easier scanning.
Angela selects the Delivery Cost business term, reviews the Overview, and confirms the official definition. She navigates to the Relationships tab and reviews the technical assets linked to it—including the tables and flat fields that contain the customer data—as well as the policies that govern its use. She switches to a list view to scan all related assets at once. With the official definition confirmed, Angela can now share it with both the finance and marketing teams at Infiwave. With CDGC, she resolves the reporting conflict and establishes a single source of truth.