Finally, that looks like the answer for our needs. IBM Business Glossary (BG) is a product that manages our business vocabulary. It enables users to create business terms (also called entities), edit them, share them and to customize them. We've seen the product in IBM, Israel and we liked it very much. Here is a brief summary of the meeting:

Managing meta data in the organization is a difficult task. First of all, you need to know what kind of MD you want to manage. There are three main types:

• Business MD - The vocabulary that contains the terms of the business.
• Technical MD - Names and attributes of data storages, tables, columns, etc.
• Operational MD - How the information flows inside the organization.

The BG gives common language to the organization and connects the business to the IT. First of all, it creates a contract - everybody knows exactly what is a "high value customer" for example. That supposed to be the end of confusion about business terms. It also helps to understand things, exposes knowledge and connect all the technical details.
In BG, all the terms has the same common attributes, such as name, description, example, related entities, etc. The users can define more custom attributes if they want. The product also manages the Data Stewardship, meaning that every entity has a father/manager. It can also have two fathers - one from the business and one from the technical aspect (Update: Not in the current version). The terms are divided into subject areas/context. This way you can go to a subject and learn it all by going over all its entities. You can see and use its custom attributes. For example, you can have a link there to reports that contains/lists that entity.

There's much more to say about BG. All I wanted is to give a brief overview of what it is and you can see if it can help you. I'll give my pros and cons for this product:

Pros:

• Making order in the organization - everybody knows what you talking about when you say a term. Every entity has a defined father/business-expert.
• Manages business knowledge over time. You can take a new employee and instead of taking other's employee's precious time to teach him everything, just tell him to go over the business glossary. (I'm not naive, but it will reduce time)
• Fast lookup time - I want to know in which tables in the databases an entity is placed. I can find it in seconds.

Cons:

• Security - BG has almost no security module at all, meaning that everybody sees everything.
• Doesn't support services yet. I would like to see which services exposes and which services consumes an entity. I want to call the service, provide it with input and see the output.
• The stewardship module is still weak. In the meantime, there is only one father of an entity.
• The custom attributes are the same for the entire vocabulary. What if I would like to have a custom attribute only for one subject area?
• There isn't a hebrew interface yet. The interface can be only in English, Spanish and French (if I'm not wrong).

For conclusion, I think that the product is good, even very good. The problem is that its development has to go on several iterations before it can be used a variety of organizations. It just doesn't have all the features that a business vocabulary must have. Wait a year and you'll see a wonderful product.