Enterprise Architecture Data Dictionary

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Since most companies can’t run on a single physical, enterprise-wide database even if they could pull off the political side, more progress was made in the 1980s when data dictionaries were developed to provide central control over data definitions while allowing decentralized database deployment.

Where databases provided for shared data between multiple applications by providing a single database, data dictionaries added the ability to integrate multiple databases.
The concept of an Enterprise Architecture data dictionary provided an enterprise or holistic view of data since it would encompass all databases in the enterprise. The Enterprise Architecture data dictionary would ensure that there were common definitions so data could be consolidated or synchronized between different physical databases. You could have a customer database as part of the marketing system and a customer database as part of the order processing system, but you would have the ability to coordinate the same customer record between the two or more databases.

An Enterprise Architecture encyclopedia can be based on a standard data dictionary. Some of the objects in that dictionary can be used for all of the modeling activities, regardless of methodology. For example, data entities, data structures, and data domains are used in business, process, and data models. It must rely on the fact that the definitions used throughout the modeling activities are consistent. In addition, this reusability provides extensive traceability of data usage.

Popkin Software is one of the company who’s providing special software for Enterprise Architecture Data Dictionary.