Finding Assets

Finding relevant data assets in your organization is one of the main use cases for Katalogue. There are two main ways to find assets - browsing and searching.

Browse

Assets in Katalogue are organized in three main hierarchial categories, or tree-like structures. These can be explored by hierarchical browsing, or drill-down navigation:

• Datasets. Applications and containers with technical data assets, like tables, views and spreadsheets. Can be thought of as data models. Contains assets in the following hierarchial order:
  1. Systems
  2. Datasources
  3. Dataset Groups
  4. Datasets
  5. Fields
• Field Description. Acts as both re-usable descriptions of fields/columns and attributes to business terms, effectively creating a link between the technical data assets and business terms. Contains assets in the following hierarchial order:
  1. Field Descriptions
  2. Field Description Values
• Glossaries. Collections of business terms and how they are related to each other, to define common terminology, like customer, product and revenue. Can be thought of as information models. Contains assets in the following hierarchial order:
  1. Glossaries
  2. Business Terms
  3. Field Descriptions

Examples

1. Select the “Datasets” option in the Katalogue navigation pane to list all systems.
2. Select a system in the list to see its details and a list of all datasources in the system.
3. Select a datasource in the list to see its details and a list of all dataset groups in the system.
4. Click the ”< BACK” button to go back to the last visited asset, i.e. go up one level in the hierarchy to the list of datasources.
5. Select another datasource to see its details and a list of all dataset groups in the system.
6. Etc until you find what you are looking for.

Search

Katalogue comes with a simple, yet powerful search function to find relevant assets.

Technically, the search functionality is based on the PostgreSQL Full Text Search feature, see the Architecture page for more details.

Examples

Simple Search

The default behaviour is wildcard match with “and”-logic.

This searches for data assets containing words that begin with “customer” and “name”:

customer name

Context Search

Use a colon to invoke the context search index. This can be used to limit your search to a certain context.

This searches for data assets matching “customer” in systems, datasets etc that match “crm”:

customer : crm

Exact Name Search

Use a space at the end to find assets with exact names.

This searches data asset names that exactly matches “customer_name”:

customer_name // with a space at the end

Phrase Search

Use quotation marks to search for exact phrase matches.

This searches for data assets matching exactly the word “customer” directly followed by “name”:

"customer name"

Or Logic

Use a pipe to match assets with “or” logic.

This searches for data assets containing words that begin with either “customer” or “name”:

customer | name

Exclude Words

Use an exclamation mark to exclude words.

This searches for data assets matching “customer” and that does not include the word “name”:

customer ! name