Hi Keith

I can recommend the Australian Metadata Online Registry (MeteOR) as a good example of a data dictionary.

https://meteor.aihw.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/181162

The site includes links to Australian national minimum data sets and national data dictionaries, which you might find helpful as a guide to how to set up your own.

I think it is important to understand data modelling concepts when creating a data dictionary. A data model has three levels:

Conceptual - the 'entities' that make up an organisation, such as 'Employee', 'Client', 'Property', 'Accounts'
Logical - the data elements or agreed 'fields' with a description of each that would normally make up each entity (e.g., 'Name', 'Phone', 'Language'). This is usually at the data dictionary level and may not connect directly with tables in a database. It is more of a guide to preferred usage.
Physical - the actual database tables that database administrators work with. In an ideal world the physical layer will have strong correlation with the logical level (same data terms). In reality, third-party database applications will often use whatever data elements the developers decided to use (e.g., 'Sex' instead of 'Gender', or free text instead of choice)

(For an overview, see https://www.guru99.com/data-modelling-conceptual-logical.html)

When creating a data dictionary I think it's useful to first establish a conceptual data model. Doing this requires you to consider the conceptual entities that exist in your organisation, for example 'Client', 'Employee', 'Property'.

Once you settle on entities, then you can drop down to the logical data level, the fields that make up each entity. For example, the 'Employee' entity will have data elements such as 'Name', 'Address', 'Phone', 'Gender'. You will find that some entities share the same logical data element/s such as 'address'. I can be useful to know which conceptual entities share the same logical data elements.

We have two types of data dictionary in our organisation:

Excel spreadsheet-based data dictionaries (created and maintained by the DB Admins). These describe the physical data layer for each table for our core databases.
A Word-based data dictionary (created by me). This document, which is effectively our reference model, describes the conceptual entities and logical data elements.

In our data dictionary, we identified which databases used which entities and/or data elements, and whether its use in that database was consistent with the preferred option. For example, if 'Gender' was the preferred data dictionary term (with choice options) but some database applications used 'Sex' and/or had free text.

Andrew Warland

Melbourne, Australia

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 12:06 AM Greenaway, Keith <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi all.

Does anyone on the list have any experience with corporate-wide Data Dictionaries? Developing and creating them, maintaining and managing them?

We’re looking to find out people’s experiences, best practice, does and don’t etc.

Happy to be contacted off list.

Kind regards,

Keith

Keith Greenaway | Lead Data & Information Governance Officer | Information and Technology

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