Data and Information Inventory and Attributes

Common Formats

[Multi-Value]

Description — The file, exchange, or encoding formats in which this Data and Information type commonly appears across the enterprise.

Benefit(s) — Enables format-aware integration design and data pipeline architecture. Surfaces format diversity that may require transformation governance.

Source — Manual.

Examples — JSON; XML; CSV; Parquet; PDF; HL7 FHIR; EDI X12; Avro; Excel

Notes — Informational rather than prescriptive — a type may appear in multiple formats depending on context. Separate multiple values with semicolons.

Description — Order-of-magnitude estimate of how many instances of this type the enterprise generates, receives, or processes per day or month.

Benefit(s) — Informs storage architecture, processing infrastructure sizing, and retention cost estimation. A type with billions of daily instances requires fundamentally different infrastructure than one with thousands.

Source — Manual.

Examples — Thousands per day (Regulatory Filings), Millions per day (Transaction Records), Billions per month (Clickstream Events)

Description — How frequently instances of this type are produced, updated, or received.

Benefit(s) — Informs streaming vs. batch architecture decisions. Real-time types require fundamentally different pipeline design than periodic types.

Source — Manual.

Examples — Real-time (sub-second), Near-real-time (seconds to minutes), Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Periodic (ad hoc or scheduled)

Notes — For types with variable velocity, record the governing or most common velocity.

Description — The identifier or link to the corresponding entry for this Data and Information type in the enterprise Data Catalog, where one exists.

Benefit(s) — Connects the logical governance layer (this inventory) to the physical asset discovery layer (the Data Catalog). Enables practitioners to navigate from a governed Data and Information type to its technical metadata, schema details, and physical asset locations in the catalog without manual search.

Source — Manual.

Examples — Collibra Asset ID: 7f3a-2b91, Alation Article: /data/customer-profile, Microsoft Purview: Customer_Profile_v2, AWS Glue: customer_profile_table

Notes — The Data and Information Inventory is the governance vocabulary layer; the Data Catalog is the physical asset discovery layer. These are complementary, not competing instruments. See the Data and Information Governance Context section of this document for a full discussion of the relationship between this inventory and the enterprise Data Catalog.