Get Started with Catalog and Glossary

Throughout this guide, you’ll mainly be working with the following areas of the application: Knowledge Catalog and Business Glossary:

Next, let’s define what we understand by catalog items and business terms.

To find the data asset you want to work with, use the full-text search, filters, or a combination of both.

Let’s see how this works in Data Catalog. Suppose we want to find a catalog item called customers that contains information about our clients, such as contact details, the assigned salesperson, and so on.

Select a catalog item to learn more about it:

Depending on the asset you picked, the catalog item might have some business terms assigned or suggested and some DQ evaluation results available. If there aren’t any, it means the catalog item was imported but not yet analyzed or validated. We’ll get back to this later, in section Profile and validate data assets.

Let’s go back to the catalog item customers to take a closer look at term suggestions.

On the Overview tab of the catalog item, in the Attributes section, notice the difference between terms and term suggestions.

Terms are used to label your data and play a key role in evaluating and maintaining the quality of your data. On the other hand, term suggestions are generated as potential matches for your data and should be accepted or rejected.

Review the list of suggestions and confirm those that make sense to you while removing any that don’t. This way, the platform learns from your choices and makes future suggestions more precise.

Once you resolve the suggestions, you need to finalize your changes by publishing them.

In addition to confirming term suggestions, you can manually assign business terms that best describe your data. The same process can also be automated using term detection and detection rules: we cover this in Get Started with Data Quality.

To try it out, open the customers catalog item and find the postalcode attribute. In the three dots menu, select Show details.

In Terms, find a suitable term, for example, Postal code, and add the term.

Finally, publish your changes. Not all users have the necessary permissions for this. If that is the case, submit your draft for publishing instead.

To share your term with other users, use the Share option (see Share access to data assets).

If you assigned additional terms to your catalog item, the profile of your data is no longer up-to-date. To update it, you need to run sample or full profiling.

Navigate to the data asset you’re interested in and check the profiling results on the Profile and DQ insights tab. Run Sample or Full profiling to recalculate the results or create your first profile if none are available.

From this same tab, select a specific attribute to view a more detailed breakdown.

Look also at what profiling results are available for attributes of different data types, for example, for string and numeric values.

Ataccama ONE comes with a number of preconfigured business terms. While these cover a wide array of different domains, such as finance, marketing, or sales, you often need to create additional business terms specifically for the data you’re working with.

To create a new business term, go to Business Glossary. Select Create and pick the term type that best suits your need.

Enter the term name and business definition, then choose the term owner from the list of users.

Now let’s define how the new term relates to other terms in the hierarchy. On the term overview screen, in Relations, select the appropriate relationship type, for example, child of.

The next step is to define the parent term: select Add next to the relationship type and choose a term from the list.

Finally, explore the term hierarchy to see where your term fits in. In Business Glossary, switch to the All tab, and search for the term. Select the appropriate viewing mode and expand the term hierarchy from the parent to the child level.

Data categorization is one of the first steps towards knowing your data better. As we mentioned previously, you can manually assign new terms to data assets or automate the process using detection rules.

Detection rules function independently from AI-powered term detection, which generates term suggestions.

These rules let you define a stricter set of conditions for recognizing business domains, so you can verify the value format, look for values from a reference list, and so on.

Whether a term is assigned to catalog item attributes based on a detection rule depends on two factors:

Use comments and tasks to collaborate efficiently across teams.

Any change made to the configuration of a data asset must be approved by the asset owner before it is made visible to other users.

In some cases, like when creating a new business term, a more complex, multistep approval process is initiated. Here you can choose whether to create a new approval request or, if there are other pending changes, add your request to an existing one.

Describe each change in a dedicated field so that the approver has all the information they need in one spot.

Approval requests are then assigned to the person who should validate the change and confirm or decline it. With default settings, this is the admin user.

View all approval requests from the Approval Requests section of the application.

If you find a data asset that should be made available to a specific team in your organization, use Share to grant access to all relevant parties, whether it’s a user or a group.

You can share catalog items, terms, rules, and so on. The Share option is available in the upper-right corner of every screen.

You can review the current access configuration at any point and check the list of available values through search.

Select the user or group you want to share the asset with and then select the appropriate access level. The following access levels are available:

You can review or remove the access provided at any point using the same Share option.