Reference
Glossary
Key terms used across these guides, in plain language.
A–Z
- Access control
- Rules that decide who can read, change or share data. Read more
- Anonymisation
- Processing data so individuals cannot reasonably be identified. Read more
- API
- A programmatic interface for accessing data. Read more
- Clean room
- An environment for joint analysis without exposing raw records. Read more
- Data catalog
- A searchable inventory of data assets. Read more
- Data contract
- An agreement on schema, quality and change rules. Read more
- Data governance
- Roles, policies and processes for managing data. Read more
- Data lake
- Low-cost storage for data in any format. Read more
- Data lineage
- A map of where data comes from and where it goes. Read more
- Data mesh
- A decentralised, domain-owned approach to analytical data. Read more
- Data product
- Data packaged and maintained for its users. Read more
- Data steward
- The person who looks after a dataset’s meaning and quality. Read more
- Data warehouse
- Structured storage optimised for analytical queries. Read more
- DCAT
- A W3C vocabulary for describing datasets. Read more
- DOI
- A persistent identifier for citing datasets. Read more
- ELT / ETL
- Orders of extract, load and transform steps. Read more
- FAIR
- Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. Read more
- GDPR
- The EU General Data Protection Regulation. Read more
- Lakehouse
- Open table formats on lake storage with warehouse features. Read more
- Metadata
- Data about data. Read more
- Observability
- Monitoring the health of data and pipelines. Read more
- Open data
- Data anyone can access, use and share. Read more
- Open licence
- Terms that permit reuse, e.g. CC BY or ODbL. Read more
- Parquet
- A columnar file format for analytics. Read more
- Pseudonymisation
- Replacing identifiers with codes; still personal data. Read more
- Semantic layer
- Shared definitions of metrics and dimensions. Read more
- Version control
- Recording every change so it can be reviewed or undone. Read more
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