Skip to main content

Privacera Documentation

Dictionaries

Dictionaries are lists of values used to identify data elements. Privacera Discovery matches dictionaries against your resources and data and can be applied to either content or metanames.

Example dictionaries include:

  • A dictionary of US person names used to identify names in a database.

  • A dictionary of common column name patterns used to identify a column of account IDs.

Dictionaries support multiple include/exclude patterns. This helps enable a longer transition from conventional patterns for pattern matching. For example, the 'email' conventional pattern and its associated structured and unstructured rules can be disabled and the same pattern value can be added as part of a new dictionary lookup. The resulting rules can then be configured just as conventional patterns.

Types of dictionaries

There are three types of dictionaries in Privacera Discovery:

  • Exact match: the value of the data must exactly match the value in the dictionary.

  • Fuzzy match: the matching is based on fuzzy logic instead of exact match.

  • Pattern match: the values in the dictionary are regular expressions.

Dictionary Keys

The key is used by Discovery Rules to associate a tag with a resource element. Because a dictionary can be applied to either content or metaname, a naming convention is used for the key:

  • Content dictionary: LOOKUP suffix.

  • Metaname dictionary: KEYWORD suffix.