NOTE

these pages are primarily for internal audiences rather than users of the Data Platform; we will host user-facing documentation separately.

Data Dictionary

A data dictionary is used to contextualise the purpose and structure of a dataset for the users of a dataset. For structured data it contains column names, types and descriptions for each column of a table.

This descriptive data is captured as part of each Table Schema in a Data Product.

Example

In general, a column will have the following attributes:

name
type
description

The following Table Schema defines one table called “population_by_offence”, with five columns - “row_id”, “offence_code”, “offence, "date”, and “population”.

---
tableDescription: Prison population by offence.
columns:
- name: row_id
  type: int
  description: primary key for this table. auto-incrementing integer
- name: offence_code
  type: string
  description: code for the offence type
- name: offence
  type: string
  description: offence type name
- name: date
  type: date
  description: month for aggregation of prison population by offence
- name: population
  type: int
  description: number of prisoners with that offence_code at the start of that month

Data Dictionary

Example

Further reading