Master Data:
A master data is information that an enterprise agree upon. And enterprise may or most likely to have several departments like HR, Marketing, Sales, Procurement, Manufacturing etc.
Now all these departments may have different system, HR department may have some HRMS, Marketing and Sales departments may have some Marketing and/or Sales Management system.
You would have products in the Marketing system and in the sales system too. That product data should be same in both the system, these are the products that both Market and sales agreed to use. It should not happen that both the
systems have different set of products.
Another example could be Customer data.
Another example could be Employee data.
Another example could be Supplier data.
Reference Data:
Reference data is something that defines permissible limits to use the data.
Like currency codes which would be very much standards and would rarely change.
Reference data is mostly used to maintain data quality or data validation or data standardization purpose.
If I am maintaining currency codes, then all the systems (be it HR, Sales etc..) should use same currency codes.
Another example of reference data could be Country Codes or State Codes.
