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Data Science & Analytics vocabulary · Data Collection and Cleaning

Data dictionary

Meaning in data science & analytics, with examples

nounCommon term

In data science & analytics, data dictionary means: A document or table that describes every field in a dataset: its name, meaning, data type, allowed values, source and owner.

In Turkish: veri sözlüğü

How it is used

You write, maintain, check or update a data dictionary. New analysts are told to read it first, and good teams keep it up to date. In larger companies it often lives inside a data catalog tool.

Example sentences

  1. According to the data dictionary, status 4 means 'cancelled by customer'.

  2. Please add the new columns to the data dictionary before the release.

Common collocations

  • maintain a data dictionary
  • check the data dictionary
  • data catalog
  • field definitions
  • schemaThe structure of a database or dataset: which tables exist, which columns they have, the data type of each column and how the tables relate to each other.
  • data qualityHow accurate, complete, consistent and up to date data is, and therefore how far it can be trusted when people make decisions.
  • datasetA collection of related data, usually organised as a table of rows and columns, that is used for analysis or for training a model.
  • data lineageA record of where data comes from, which steps and systems it passes through and how it changes along the way, right up to the reports that use it.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Data Collection and Cleaning

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