Dictionary best practices
Read up on some best practices and strategies around building out a Dictionary within Secoda
We've put together some ideas around best practices when building out a Dictionary within Secoda. There's not one way to go about these as every organization has different requirements, but here are some ideas that have proven to work well 🚀
Choosing terms
If you have an existing list of terms and definitions hosted elsewhere...
Use our Import feature to automatically bulk upload these into Secoda via CSV format
If you don't have a list yet, and need to start fresh...
It's important to initially focus on high-impact terms that are important to your users within Secoda
Consider hosting a small group workshop with your workspace Admins, or some core editors
Brainstorm a list of highly-used, high-impact terms across your organization or data team
Think of terms that are often misused, undefined, or confusing for your stakeholders
Vote on the priority of each term and make plans to gather the right people in a room to develop definitions for these
Utilizing the Templates feature within the UI is a great way to ensure that documentation standards are set and followed
Admins of each Team should create dictionary templates so that editors know what kind of information is expected to be added to each term
Organization
Since each Team has it's own section for a dictionary, you might consider ways to organize the many terms that your organization needs to define
Consider using the General Team dictionary as an onboarding tool
Define more general terms that span across the whole organization
Define company jargon and acronyms that can often get confusing for new hires
Team-specific dictionaries
Define terms by Team, based on which team owns those terms and therefore owns the documentation of them
Consider Nesting terms so that they are easier to navigate for your users
Enrich dictionary terms
Add enrichment to dictionary terms by adding them to relevant Collections, adding owners and tags, link them to related terms
Don't forget that you can make bulk changes to terms and use some of our other documentation tips listed here Documentation best practices
This ensures that they're even more searchable within the UI, and so users can see how terms and resources are related across the workspace
Verification
Consider using our Verification tag in order to indicate that a term is ready to be used, and the definition has been approved by the data team or a list of relevant stakeholders
The goal of this tag is to provide trust in the data for users, so that users feel confident using the term in their workflows
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