Caitlin Hudon shares some great advice on building data dictionaries:
The best defense I’ve found against relying on an oral history is creating a written one.
Enter the data dictionary. A data dictionary is a “centralized repository of information about data such as meaning, relationships to other data, origin, usage, and format”, and provides us with a framework to store and share all of the institutional knowledge we have about our data.
As part of my role as a lead data scientist as a start-up, building a data dictionary was one of the first tasks I took on (started during my first week on the job). Learning about our data is a crucial part of onboarding for data-focused roles, and documenting that journey in the form of a data dictionary provides a useful data asset for the company (which helps to preserve institutional knowledge) and simultaneously provides a good resource for analyzing the data.
Read the whole thing.