# Data Glossary

The **Data Glossary** section of ODD Platform is the home for the in-app **Business Glossary** — operator-curated term entities that name and describe the concepts your data represents. The role is durable: anything that captures the *meaning* of an entity (what `Customer` means in your taxonomy, how `Order` relates to `Line Item`, who owns each definition) belongs here.

ODD covers Data Glossary fully through the Business Glossary feature. See the [Data Governance map](/introduction/main-concepts.md#data-governance-map) for the position of Data Glossary among the other governance pillars.

{% hint style="info" %}
**Not the Main Concepts page.** The [Main Concepts](/introduction/main-concepts.md) docs page captures the *project's* vocabulary — Data Entity, Plugin, Push adapter, ODDRN. The **Business Glossary** described here is the *catalog's* vocabulary — operator-authored term entities that live inside ODD Platform and link to the data they describe. Same word "glossary", different things.
{% endhint %}

Open it from the top-level navigation **Dictionary** tab (the in-app surface for browsing and curating terms). Term entities also surface inline on every data-entity detail page in the **Terms** section once descriptive associations are made.

## Subsections

* [**Business Glossary**](/features/data-glossary/business-glossary.md) — full reference for terms as catalog entities: the Dictionary tab UI, namespace-scoped terms, ownership and the seven `TERM_*` RBAC permissions, term-to-term linking (description-text mentions vs direct links), term-to-data-entity descriptive associations (the Wikipedia-About-style walkthrough), and the API surface.

## Why this is a separate pillar

For how Data Glossary relates to the other governance pillars (Data Discovery, Data Modelling, Master Data Management, Data Lineage, Data Quality), see [Main Concepts → Data Governance map → Pillar differentiation](/introduction/main-concepts.md#pillar-differentiation) — the canonical home for the six-pillar framing. Glossary is its own pillar because terms are a separate entity class with their own lifecycle (create / approve / link / retire), ownership model, RBAC, and search surface — first-class catalog citizens that data entities reference, not metadata attached to other entities.

## Where to next

* [Business Glossary](/features/data-glossary/business-glossary.md) — the dedicated reference covering terms, term-to-term linking, descriptive associations, ownership, and the API surface.
* [API Reference → Glossary](/developer-guides/api-reference/glossary.md) — the HTTP surface for term CRUD, term-to-term linkage, and term-to-entity assignment.
* [Permissions](/configuration-and-deployment/enable-security/authorization/permissions.md) — the platform-wide permission catalog, including the `TERM_*` rows.
* [Main Concepts → Data Governance map](/introduction/main-concepts.md#data-governance-map) — Data Glossary's position among the governance pillars.


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