Data Hierarchy

Data Hierarchy is a known term and most of us are aware of it but sometimes, it’s confused with Data Taxonomy & Data Ontology.

Data Taxonomy and Data Ontology are metadata for the purpose of Data Governance whereas Data Hierarchies presents actual data. A very well-known and famous example is the Organizational Chart where hierarchy starts from CEO and goes down to Database Administrator in data domain.

• ‘Data Taxonomies apply to identified objects or phenomena.’’
• ‘Data Ontologies apply to terms, concepts, or categories.’
• ‘Data Hierarchy is a chain of relationship in actually data.’

Family tree is another simple example.

Data can be grouped in a way where data exploration and representation become easy. For example, at database level, hierarchy can be Database 🡪 Files/ Tables 🡪 Records 🡪 Fields/ Columns 🡪 Bytes 🡪 Bits.

Same line Data Taxonomy, Data Hierarchy also have single parent and multiple child relationship among the rows of dataset.