Comment by bitwize

In Milt and Tim Bryce's PRIDE system, one of the first steps in designing a system for an organization is adopting organization-wide standards and vocabulary. This includes cataloguing every piece of data recorded by the system, including its name, type, and relevance in a data dictionary.

In PRIDE/ASDM, literally every field in every table is catalogued online in this way, where it's searchable and discoverable by anyone working on the system.

PRIDE has been around since the seventies. And Netflix is discovering unification of data representations across the company just now? That's what happens when you let programmers design your systems, instead of systems analysts.