Data Object Naming Standards Overview
This document outlines standards and guidelines for creating Business Names. A Business Name is an English phrase with a specific construction and length that describes a single data object.
A Business Name distinguishes similar and sometimes misinterpreted data objects. For example, 'person id' may be used in two applications. In the first application, 'person id' may refer to a user id. In the second application, it may be a universal id. Using naming standards, the data element names would be 'person user id' and 'person universal id' respectively.
A number of benefits accrue from the use of Business Names:
- A consistent basis is established to implement the university's data dictionary/repository.
- A common understanding of data in the university community is achieved.
- System developers and business users can more readily locate, reuse, merge, and analyze data from other administrative units to meet programming and reporting needs.
- Data reuse is enhanced, which improves the quality and utility of newly developed applications.
- System developers and database analysts can develop better models.
- Meaningful Business Names require the analyst to specify exact definitions, which allows redundant data to be identified and eliminated.
- By giving their business users a better understanding of the data they access, the tasks of Data Stewards and Data Managers are simplified.
The following data objects were determined to represent the majority of institutional data. They were selected based on end-user requirements gathered by the data dictionary/repository evaluation project.
Repository Metadata
Data Models
Databases
Tables, Views, Files, Entities
Columns, Data Elements, Attributes
As the scope of the repository increases, additional naming standards for transactions, reports, jobstreams and programs may be added.