DGO Atlas

Publish your organization's business glossary as a website, with a clear record of who owns each term and how it was approved.

What it does

A business glossary gives shared definitions for the words an organization uses in its data: what counts as a "clinical trial," an "active student" or "direct costs." Keeping those definitions consistent is hard when they live in spreadsheets and wikis, where it isn't clear who owns a definition, whether it's approved, or when it last changed.

With Atlas, you keep the glossary in plain text files in a Git repository. Each term records its definition, who is responsible for it, and every step of its review. Atlas checks the files for mistakes, such as a term that refers to an owner who doesn't exist, and then builds a searchable static website you can host anywhere, including GitHub Pages.

Because the glossary lives in Git, every change goes through a pull request and has a full history.

Built on a shared standard

Your files follow the Data Governance Ontology (DGO). DGO is a published vocabulary that defines the parts of data governance, such as terms, owners, stewards, councils and approval steps, and how they relate to each other. You write in everyday words like owner or approved, and Atlas translates them into DGO's standard definitions. That means other tools can read and reuse your glossary without guessing what your fields mean.

Get started

You need uv, a Python package manager.

uvx dgo-atlas init my-glossary
cd my-glossary
uv run dgo-atlas build

Open site/index.html to see the result. The new project includes example terms, a sample council and a GitHub Actions workflow that builds the site on every pull request.

Here is a small part of an example term:

glossary_terms:
  - id: org:clinical-trial
    label: clinical trial
    definition: A research study in which participants are assigned to interventions...
    responsibilities:
      - type: owner
        role_of: org:research-office

Everyday commands

Settings

Titles, colors, fonts and page wording are customizable by changing the values in dgo-atlas.yaml. Every setting and its default is listed in dgo-atlas.example.yaml.

Learn more

• DGO: the vocabulary your files follow

License

MIT