Terminology
reference Facts, options, APIs
Each term below has exactly one home in the documentation. If you are looking for the definition, start here; if you are looking for how to work with the thing, follow the link.
| Term | What it means | Canonical home |
|---|---|---|
| Golden record | The single trusted record for one real-world thing, built from all the data parts that describe it. | Core concepts - working with them: Master |
| Data part | One system’s version of a record at one point in time. Golden records are assembled from data parts. | Data life cycle |
| Clue | The unit of data CluedIn ingests - a record plus its metadata and identifiers. | Clue reference |
| Business domain | The classification of a record, such as Customer or Product. Formerly called entity type. | Model |
| Vocabulary | The set of properties that describe records in a business domain. Formerly called schema. | Model |
| Vocabulary key | One property within a vocabulary. | Model |
| Identifier | A value that identifies a record across systems and lets CluedIn connect records. Formerly called entity code. | Model |
| Edge / relationship | A connection between two records. | Model |
| Origin | The system a data part came from. | Core concepts |
| Eventual connectivity | Records connecting up as evidence arrives, rather than requiring an agreed schema up front. | Core concepts |
| Data source | A file, database, endpoint or connector that feeds records into CluedIn. | Ingest |
| Mapping | The definition of which source column becomes which vocabulary key. | Ingest |
| Clean project | A workspace for fixing recurring data quality problems. | Govern & improve |
| Deduplication project | A workspace for finding and merging duplicate records. | Master |
| Rule | Logic applied automatically to data parts or golden records. | Govern & improve |
| Enricher | A service that adds data from an external source. | Govern & improve |
| Glossary term | A named group of golden records that meet a condition. | Govern & improve |
| Stream | A continuous export of golden records to an export target. | Publish & consume |
| Export target | The destination a stream writes to. | Publish & consume |
Several of these names changed in the 2025.05 release. See Terminology changes for the full before-and-after list.