Metric explanations and glossary: Implementation and data quality

Specifies storage, interfaces, validation, access, freshness, monitoring, and failure behavior for metric explanations and glossary, so adopters can translate metric names, abbreviations, formulas, and caveats into language that a non-analyst can understand...

Package status: reference context ready for human review. The contract and test scenarios are complete, but no claim is made that an adopting implementation has passed them.

Decision

For Metric explanations and glossary, implement the semantic contract through owned, typed boundaries so adopters can translate metric names, abbreviations, formulas, and caveats into language that a non-analyst can understand at the point of use. Explanations clarify registered facts and limitations; they may not invent a new formula, hide uncertainty, or replace the canonical definition. This is a reference contract: database products, numeric budgets, jurisdictions, retention, organizational defaults, and accountable owners remain explicit adoption choices.

Scope

• The Metric explanations and glossary actors, inputs, outputs, states, versions, and externally visible outcomes needed to translate metric names, abbreviations, formulas, and caveats into language that a non-analyst can understand at the point of use.
• The role-specific focus of this block: implement the semantic contract through owned, typed boundaries, including primary, cached, asynchronous, export, support, and recovery paths where applicable.
• Adoption-specific configuration, ownership, rollout, evidence retention, and review responsibilities needed to use the contract safely.

Outside this block

• Explanations clarify registered facts and limitations; they may not invent a new formula, hide uncertainty, or replace the canonical definition.
• Choosing a universal database, model, renderer, vendor, numeric threshold, retention period, timezone, jurisdiction, or service-level objective.
• Claiming that packaged scenarios ran against a downstream implementation or that this reference grants security, privacy, accessibility, analytical, or legal approval.

Contract

• The implemented Metric explanations and glossary boundary enforces this rule: Every abbreviation is expanded on first use, and every metric has a short label plus a plain-language description suitable for a reader without analytics training.
• The implemented Metric explanations and glossary boundary enforces this rule: The explanation says what is counted, what is excluded, which time is used, which population is visible, and whether the number is exact, estimated, sampled, or partial.
• The implemented Metric explanations and glossary boundary enforces this rule: A worked example uses small fictional values to explain ratios, percentages, distinct counts, and comparison deltas without presenting sample values as targets.
• The implemented Metric explanations and glossary boundary enforces this rule: Tooltips provide the short explanation while a details view exposes formula, owner, source, freshness, version, caveats, and change history.
• The implemented Metric explanations and glossary boundary enforces this rule: Localized labels keep the same canonical metric ID and formula version; translation may not create a second meaning for the same identifier.
• The implemented Metric explanations and glossary boundary enforces this rule: The interface avoids unexplained codes such as CTR, WAU, p95, or internal event names and offers a glossary link wherever such a term is unavoidable.
• The implemented Metric explanations and glossary boundary enforces this rule: A generated narrative uses the registered display name and explanation, not a guessed expansion learned from model training.
• The implemented Metric explanations and glossary boundary enforces this rule: Comprehension feedback is attached to the explanation version and reviewed by the semantic owner before wording changes become active.

Implementation guidance

• Store the versioned semantic object separately from database-specific compiled artifacts and presentation-specific documents.
• Validate at ingestion, registry, query, result, and rendering boundaries and keep one normalized representation through downstream steps.
• Roll out additively, compare old and new evidence over frozen fixtures, and keep a reversible migration until consumers adopt the new version.
• Instrument success, rejection, staleness, partial results, version conflicts, and repair without recording sensitive payloads.

Failure handling and safeguards

• For Metric explanations and glossary, If no approved explanation exists for the selected locale, show the canonical language with a locale warning rather than machine-invented terminology.
• For Metric explanations and glossary, If a label and formula version disagree, suppress the interpretation and expose the version conflict to the owner.
• For Metric explanations and glossary, If the result is partial, stale, sampled, or access-trimmed, the explanation cannot be collapsed into an invisible tooltip only.

Verification and operations

• For the implementation evidence of Metric explanations and glossary, run comprehension tests with representative non-analyst users and require them to identify population, period, unit, and direction correctly.
• For the implementation evidence of Metric explanations and glossary, compare every rendered label and glossary entry with the metric catalog version returned in the same result contract.
• For the implementation evidence of Metric explanations and glossary, exercise narrow, translated, and accessibility views and verify that essential caveats remain available without hover or color perception.

Adoption assumptions

• The adopting product has authenticated identity, a versioned authorization policy, owned metric definitions, bounded telemetry, and a controlled path for change.
• Names and values in the example are fictional adoption fixtures, not universal defaults, production credentials, performance promises, or business targets.
• Referenced specifications constrain protocol, security, accessibility, or vendor behavior; the adopting team must confirm current applicability before promotion.

The executable-looking examples in this package are fixtures and acceptance contracts. Run the collection validator to check structure and metadata, then translate and execute the scenarios in the target repository before recording implementation evidence.

References

• W3C WAI, Complex Images tutorial (applies as of 2026-09-12)