[Sigia-l] Shared Dictionary Product?

[Timothy Karsjens]

I am trying to weigh confidentiality agreements and a distinct need to help a co-worker out, so please bear with some vagueness and ambiguity when I ask this...

The company I am currently working with has a definitive need to have a Shared Dictionary across multiple applications.  The problem is, we are trying to organize data that has relationships across disparate applications.  Essentially, we need a solution to the following problem:

In Application 1: A stapler is defined as: OBJECT_STAPLER - Description: Metal Office Tool used to bind pieces of paper together with bent metal.
In Application 2: A stapler is defined as: DR_STAP_OBJECT - Description: A device used to bind material together by means of U-shaped metal loops with pointed ends.
In Application 3: A stapler is defined by color: STAPLER_RED - Description: A device used to bind material together by means of staples and is red.

A user of application 1 needs to know what the definition of stapler in Application 3 is, even though they do not know the ins and outs of application 3.  A user of Application 2 needs to know both other definitions, so that they can map directly to the other applications from application 2, in this case, making an assumption that all staplers are red.

Essentially, a user from application 1 would enter 'Stapler' as a query, and the ideal system would then display a table with the data label, data definition, and the corresponding database field name.  This stand-alone application could then do a nightly update on new fields within the different applications to remain up to date.

If I were to build a solution from scratch, I would have a pretty good idea on how to do it from both an IA point of view and a software architecture perspective.  However, that is not an option, as we do not have the development resources and I do not have the cycles to spare on it.  So, the company is looking at pre-packaged solutions to this problem.

I looked at the posts about card sorting from a while back, however, that has parallels to this process, but since this is across multiple applications, I am curious about if anyone has worked with a third party tool, rather than building one from scratch.  Also, it would be a nice to have to *not* have a lot of maintenance burden associated with the product.

Thank you in advance.

--timothy karsjens