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Nexa Platform Docs

Business Glossary

The Business Glossary is Nexa’s catalog of your entities (tables) and their attributes (columns), organized by data layer. Use it to see what data exists at each stage of the pipeline, understand each column’s meaning and type, and tag columns that hold personal or sensitive data so downstream governance can act on them. It lives at /business-glossary in the web app.

Layout

Section titled “Layout”

The glossary is a two-pane view:

  • Entities (left) — the list of tables in the selected layer, each with its name, description, owner, and domain.
  • Attributes (right) — the schema of the selected entity: one row per column.

Select an entity on the left to load its attributes on the right.

Data layers

Section titled “Data layers”

Entities are grouped by the three medallion layers, selected with the tabs at the top of the entity list:

Tab Layer Contents
Raw Raw (bronze) Ingested source data, as landed
Curated Curated (silver) Cleaned, conformed, deduplicated entities
Consumption Consumption (gold) Business-facing tables for analytics and agents

The Consumption tab is selected by default. See the curated layer and the consumption layer for how entities move between stages.

Entity metadata

Section titled “Entity metadata”

Each entity in the list shows:

Field Description
Name The entity (table) name
Description What the entity represents
Owner The entity owner (falls back to the creator, else Unknown)
Domain The business domain the entity belongs to (Consumption-layer entities can be mapped to one or more domains)

For Consumption-layer entities, click Edit Domains to map the entity to domains from your Domain Master via a multi-select. You can also generate an AI-written description for an entity or attribute with Add AI Description.

Attribute schema

Section titled “Attribute schema”

The attributes table lists each column of the selected entity:

Column Meaning
Attribute Name The column name
Description The column comment / business definition
Data Type The column’s data type (String, Double, Int, Struct, Date, Timestamp, Boolean, Long, Array, …)
PII Status Whether the column holds personally identifiable information — a toggle
Classification Tag The column’s data-classification level (e.g. internal)

You can search attributes by name and description, and filter by Attribute Data Type. A Show only PII attributes checkbox narrows the table to columns flagged as PII.

PII tagging

Section titled “PII tagging”

PII (personally identifiable information) is recorded as a per-column tag. In the PII Status column, toggle the switch on for any attribute that holds personal data — a name, email, phone number, government ID, and so on. The flag is stored on the column and is available to downstream governance and masking logic.

Data classification

Section titled “Data classification”

Separately from the PII flag, each attribute carries a Classification Tag that records its sensitivity level (for example internal). Set it from the dropdown in the Classification Tag column. The set of allowed classification values is governed centrally by your data_classification tag policy, so classifications stay consistent across every entity.

On Databricks, classification values come from the platform’s user tag policy where the tag key is data_classification; its allowed_values populate the dropdown.

How tagging fits governance

Section titled “How tagging fits governance”

PII flags and classification tags set here are the inputs to the rest of Nexa’s governance:

  • They mark which columns need masking or restricted access.
  • They flow through the Raw → Curated → Consumption layers with the entity schema.
  • Changes to glossary metadata are captured as reviewable changes — see Review Changes.
Section titled “Related”