Parties, ownership and agreements

As well as keeping track of the technical details, Data Dictionary lets you enter details of parties (people and organisations), ownership and data sharing agreements. This allows you to record the human dimension of the data, which is critical to success and good governance.

You can record a person (or an organisation) who is the contact for an item, or record to whom work on the item has been assigned.

You can record ownership of systems and data stores. Since data stores are owned by systems, you could decide to only document ownership at the system level. However, in some cases (such as a shared data warehouse system), different data stores may have different ownership and you can record this at the data store level.

You can record agreements to share data, either data stores or interfaces. In the agreement, you record the data owners who are granting access, and the people and/or organisations to which access has been granted. By using the statuses, you can indicate that an agreement is required or proposed, but has not yet come into force.