Data Engineering Glossary

Terms	Definitions
Business Glossary	A list of business terms and definitions to ensure that the same definitions are used throughout the organisation
Conceptual Data Model	High-level view of the data used in business processes and business events which documents how the different business entities relate to each other.
Data Architect	The individual responsible for formulating the organisational data strategy who possesses strong knowledge in data management and database systems.
Data Engineering Initiative	An initiative that designs and implements systems that collect and ingest data, validate data, transform data, store data, and analyse data at scale consisting of activities like data modeling, data lake and data design, data pipelines building, data integration, data testing and orchestration.
Data Governance	The Design & Execution of Standards and Policies covering Design and operation of a management system to assure that data delivers value Managing data access controls Ensuring that standards are set and met Strategic and high-level view across whole organisation
Data Owners	The individual accountable for the data subject area for which they are the “owner”.
Data Stewards	The individual appointed to take responsibility for the quality and use of their organisation’s data assets.
Data Lake	Purpose A system that can hold a vast amount of raw data in its native format until it is needed for analytics applications Characteristics Very scalable, usually is a file or object storage Stores large amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in its native format
Data Warehouse	Purpose A system that enables and supports organisations to make decisions Characteristics Usually contains large amounts of historical data Considerable time and effort to create and maintain the warehouse (Optional) Can create Data Marts for better performance during exploitation by end users
Logical Data Models	Describes data element attributes, relationships, and context independent from physical database implemented. The logical data model adds more information to the conceptual data model.
Master & Reference data	Defines and describes the nouns (things) of the business to provide contextual information about events/transactions e.g. Customer, Branch, Product etc
Master Data Management	The ongoing reconciliation and maintenance of master data to enable consistent, shared, contextual, use across systems of the most accurate, timely and relevant version of truth about essential business entities.
Physical Data Models	Database-specific and detailed internal database representation of relational data objects and their relationships.
Solution Architect	The individual who is aware of the overall technical vision of an organisation and can advise on best technical solutions at an enterprise-level.
System Owners	Owner of the technical system in which the data is stored and oversee the safe transport/storage of data. May also be known as the Data Custodian.