Ab Initio Metadata Connector for Knowledge Catalog

Metadata Connector

The Ab Initio Metadata Connector for Knowledge Catalog enhances your Google environment with valuable context. Users and agents need context to identify, understand, select, and analyze data. Context makes it possible to connect natural language with the technological language of column names, data formats, and queries.

Bidirectional integration between Ab Initio and Google’s Knowledge Catalog provides consistent context and governance across large-scale, hybrid, and multicloud environments. Ab Initio can import technical metadata (such as files formats, tables, and columns) from hundreds of sources. It links the technical metadata with valuable meaning in the form of business definitions, ontologies, lineage, data quality controls, security policies, and more. All this information is encoded into a knowledge graph that allows users, AI agents, and services to find, understand, govern, and integrate data on demand.

Together, the Ab Initio Metadata Connector and Knowledge Catalog allow you to accomplish the following in your Google environment:

• Manage business glossaries (terms and definitions) and link them to data from any source — including BigQuery. Ab Initio’s AI-powered semantic discovery capabilities automate much of the work by scanning datasets and identifying what information they contain. It suggests likely business terms that should be associated with the data fields. With your approval, it creates the linkages for you.
• Synchronize Knowledge Catalog with the rich metadata ecosystem maintained in Ab Initio. For example, you can load business dictionaries and linkages for use by BigQuery to connect business terms to data columns. You can run the synchronization process once or repeatedly on a regular schedule.
• Represent data from external sources in Knowledge Catalog. The metadata connector can load tables and fields from hundreds of data sources, including PostgreSQL, Redshift, Snowflake, and Teradata.

The Metadata Connector loads metadata of the following types from Ab Initio into Knowledge Catalog:

• Technical metadata, including databases, schemas, tables, columns, and primary and foreign key relationships
• Business metadata consisting of business terms and their definitions
• Links between technical and business metadata

Additional metadata, including data profiles and lineage, will be supported in upcoming releases.