Referensbas

Referensbas is a curated collection of reference data used as a baseline for business processes, data analytics, and decision making within an organization. It typically comprises canonical values, codes, and descriptions that describe essential entities such as geographic locations, products, accounts, units of measure, and regulatory terms. A referensbas serves as the authoritative source for how these entities are defined and represented across systems, enabling consistency, interoperability, and auditability.

The primary purpose of a referensbas is to improve data quality by providing stable, versioned values that applications can rely on. It supports data integration, reporting, and compliance by reducing ambiguity and mapping differences between disparate data sources. A referensbas usually includes identifiers, human-readable descriptions, hierarchies or classifications, synonyms, provenance information, and metadata such as version, effective dates, and change history.

Governance and lifecycle are critical. A referensbas is typically maintained by a data governance function or a designated owner. Changes go through a formal process including validation, approval, and versioned release. Deprecation and archival rules help preserve historical accuracy.

Common examples include country and currency codes, industry classifications, unit of measure, tax codes, and patient or product classifications in specific domains. In IT, referensbas can underpin master data management and reference data management practices, ensuring consistent reference values across applications.

See also: master data management, reference data management, data governance, taxonomy, ontology.