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Create a Glossary

One of the fundamental precepts of requirements engineering is to promote understanding and convergence of thought and to remove ambiguity. It is quite common for members on a project team to have quite disparate understanding of domain concepts. This can be easily rectified by creating a Project Glossary early in the project and ensuring the glossary is accessible to the project team. Enterprise Architect has a built in Glossary that allows the requirements analyst to define terms and meanings, and to create categories (types) of terms.

One of the features that makes the glossary powerful is the ability to link from text fields such as element notes to terms in the Glossary, and a rollover in the text displays the meaning.


Experienced modelers tend to define the terms of a domain in a Domain Model and reserve the glossary for project and process terms and their definitions such as Use Case, Software Requirements Specification, Metric etc. This allows relationships between domain terms to be defined and data elements (Attributes) can be added including datatypes creating a more expressive representation than would be possible in the Glossary.