Data discovery in Unity Catalog

Data discovery is the ability for users across your organization to find, understand, and trust data assets in the catalog. As an administrator, you shape discoverability through the browsing experiences you enable, the tagging metadata and trust signals you apply, and the semantic layer that defines what your data means. This page provides an overview of the data discovery capabilities in Unity Catalog and links to detailed documentation for each.

Discover page

The Discover page is a curated browsing experience where users find data assets organized by domains and subdomains or by asset type, and explore AI-recommended assets. Curators organize and highlight the most valuable assets for their organization, so consumers can browse data in a way that's aligned with how they understand the business.

To open the Discover page, click Discover in the sidebar.

The Discover page brings together several capabilities for finding and organizing data:

• Domains and subdomains: A business-aligned hierarchy that groups related assets so users can browse data by business area.
• Pages: Governed Pages that define business concepts and terms. Genie One references these Pages as the source-of-truth definition when it needs to ground an answer in a business term.
• AI-powered recommendations: Popular and valuable assets surfaced automatically to help curators highlight the best data at scale.
• Custom curation: Curator-defined sections that highlight and organize the most valuable assets for a domain or the whole organization.

Use the following pages to learn more about the Discover page and the main features within it:

Page	Description
Discover page	Browse curated data assets by domain or asset type, and search across the catalog.
Domains and subdomains	Organize data assets into a business-aligned hierarchy that consumers browse in the Discover page.
Pages	Author and govern Pages that define business concepts, surfaced in the Discover page.

Curator and consumer personas

Users interact with the Discover page as one of two personas:

• Curator: Creates and manages domains, assigns assets to them, customizes the Discover page, and enables others in the organization to browse data by business purpose. For Pages, a curator can edit, publish, and manage any Page in a domain. These actions require the MANAGE DISCOVERY permission, which account admins can grant at the account, domain, or subdomain level. See Curator permissions.
• Consumer: Uses the Discover page to find curated assets organized by domain or asset type, and explores AI-recommended assets. For Pages, a consumer can create and publish Pages, and view, comment on, and suggest edits to published Pages in a domain they can access. See Steps for consumers.

Catalog Explorer

Whereas the Discover page presents a curated subset of your data, Catalog Explorer shows everything in your catalogs, in the catalog hierarchy rather than a business-aligned one. It's the interface for browsing and inspecting data objects directly, including details that the curated view doesn't surface: object properties, permissions, sample data, and lineage. Point users at the Discover page when they want the assets your organization recommends, and at Catalog Explorer when they need the complete picture or need to inspect and configure a specific object.

To open Catalog Explorer, click Catalog in the sidebar.

Page	Description
Catalog Explorer	Browse and inspect Unity Catalog objects, and view their details, permissions, and relationships.
Explore database objects	Find and examine catalogs, schemas, tables, and other database objects in Catalog Explorer.

Unity Catalog semantics

Unity Catalog semantics is a collection of tools to help you define standard business metrics, terms, and organizational structures on top of your catalog data. This helps your organization and its AI tools work from one shared interpretation of what your data means. Unity Catalog semantics consists of the following components:

• Metric views define and govern reusable business KPIs.
• Domains and subdomains organize assets into a business-aligned hierarchy for browsing in the Discover page.
• Pages give each business concept and term an authoritative definition.
• Certification and deprecation flag which assets your organization has vetted, and which ones are outdated.

These definitions make up the human-modeled layer of the Genie Ontology: the business context that you define and govern explicitly. Genie One combines this modeled context with context it infers automatically from your assets and usage, forming a unified context layer that it draws on to answer questions.

Use the following pages to learn more about Unity Catalog semantics and its components:

Page	Description
Metric views	Define and govern consistent, reusable business KPIs as Unity Catalog objects.
Domains and subdomains	Organize data assets into a business-aligned hierarchy that consumers browse in the Discover page.
Pages	Author governed Pages that define business concepts for people and Genie One.
Flag data as certified or deprecated	Signal which data assets your organization trusts, and which are outdated.

Tagging

Tags are attributes that you apply to Unity Catalog securable objects to organize and categorize them, which makes data easier to search for and filter. With governed tags, admins mark specific tag keys as governed and define the set of allowed values for each.

For example, a governed sensitivity tag might permit only public, internal, or restricted, so the same tag is applied the same way across the catalog.

Page	Description
Apply tags to Unity Catalog securable objects	Apply and manage tags on catalog objects to organize and categorize your data.
Governed tags	Mark specific tag keys as governed and define their allowed values for consistent tagging.

Lineage

Lineage tracks how data flows across tables, columns, and AI assets, so users can trace where data comes from and how it's used before they trust it. Unity Catalog captures lineage automatically for queries run on Azure Databricks and displays it in Catalog Explorer.

Page	Description
Lineage in Unity Catalog	Capture and view how data flows across tables, columns, notebooks, and other assets.
External lineage	Track lineage for data that moves between Azure Databricks and external systems.

Certification and deprecation

You can certify a data asset to signal that it meets your organization's standards, or deprecate it to warn that it's outdated and shouldn't be used. These signals appear next to the asset in the workspace and influence how it surfaces in search, so users can judge whether to trust an asset before they use it.

For example, a blue check mark next to a data asset indicates that it has been certified.

Page	Description
Flag data as certified or deprecated	Apply system tags to mark assets as certified or deprecated.