The process of searching for and locating data assets and understanding their attributes, lineage, keys, ownership, common usage, relationships to other data sets, along with any additional metadata.
Added Perspectives
As data discovery becomes increasingly important for democratizing decision making and draws data from ever more sources, business must face the issue of managing the population of these environments. This leads to the concept of governed data discovery to ensure clean, consistent data for the business and to avoid a spaghetti-like population architecture for IT.
Discovery. A self-service workbench provides the essential features of a data catalog. Users can search using natural language. They can tag, rate, and comment on assets. Analysts can view usage statistics and preview data before querying it. If an organization has already invested in other tools, many workbenches will integrate with data catalogs and business glossaries to provide additional metadata.
Data discovery applies AI/ML to identify structures, patterns, and relationships in data and collect metadata that describes those structures, patterns, and relationships.