Browse¶

One of the key features of the Data Catalog is to help you discover resources of your data infrastructure. We have already seen that you can search for elements. But it is not the only way. You can define several classifications for your data and organize your resources according to them. Once classified, just browse your catalog, select a category and explore all the elements that belong to it.

The Data Catalog provides three ways of organizing and browsing your data assets:

1. By databases and folders. Within Virtual DataPort, views and web services are already organized following a logical structure of databases and folders. From the Data Catalog, you can inspect that classification.

2. By domains and categories. You can define a new hierarchical structure of domains and categories, specific to the Data Catalog, and assign elements to them. Like in a library, where a book can be classified by author, genre or language, a view, web service or external element can belong to several categories at the same time.

3. By tags. Besides categories, you can also define tags from the Data Catalog or import them from Virtual DataPort. They act as labels with which you can mark your elements. The same element can be tagged with several labels.

You can access and switch between these ways of browsing your data assets either from the menu at the top or through the pills that appear in the sidebar.

When you start browsing, the Data Catalog shows all the elements in the catalog at first. Select some classifier in the sidebar and you will only see those elements that belong to it.

In the elements list shown while browsing, the name of a view, web service or external element is a link to its details page¶

The elements list supports two display modes: list or grid. To have more information about an element, click the icon to enable the list mode. Instead, if you prefer more results in the page, click the icon to enable the grid mode.