Categories for governance artifacts (IBM Knowledge Catalog)

Last updated: Jan 12, 2024

A category acts like a folder or directory to organize your governance artifacts and the people who can author and manage those artifacts.

You create categories to provide the logical structure for all types of governance artifacts, except data protection rules. You group your governance artifacts in categories to make them easy to find, to manage them, and to control their visibility. Categories can be organized in a hierarchy based on their meaning and relationships to one another. A category can have subcategories, but a subcategory can have only one direct parent category.

By default, all users who have permission to access governance artifacts can view categories and their artifacts. You assign appropriate category collaborator roles to the users who must manage categories, author or manage governance artifacts, and complete assigned tasks in workflows for the category. Subcategories inherit collaborators with their corresponding roles from their parent categories. However, you can assign more roles to collaborators in subcategories. Therefore, subcategories cannot have more restrictive access than their parent categories.

The predefined Public access user group, which contains all users who have permission to access governance artifacts, is automatically added as a collaborator with the Viewer role to top-level categories.

The predefined categories are created automatically to contain the predefined governance artifacts:

[uncategorized] category contains predefined data classes and classifications.
The Locations category contains predefined reference data sets.
The Knowledge Accelerator Sample Personal Data category contains 100 predefined business terms related to personal data.

Watch the following video for an overview of categories.

This video provides a visual method to learn the concepts and tasks in this documentation.

Example of a category structure

Suppose a company that makes parts for energy suppliers wants to set up governance. The IBM Cloud account administrator assigns the Manage governance categories permission to Sammy, who is the Chief Data Officer.

Sammy creates these top-level categories:

Business units:
- Has subcategories for different departments, such as Finance, Legal, and Product development.
- Each second-level category has an executive from the corresponding department as a collaborator with the Owner role.
- Lower-level categories have data stewards from the corresponding departments as collaborators with the Owner role, plus the Public access group with the Viewer role.
- Most governance artifacts are created in these categories.
Geographies:
- Has subcategories for geographical regions to make it easy to find artifacts by region.
- Governance artifacts have secondary relationships with these categories.
- Artifacts are not created in these categories.
- The Public access group has the Viewer role.
Supplemental governance artifacts:
- Has subcategories for types of regulations and other external taxonomies.
- These categories are used as reference by data stewards when they create business terms under the Business units category.
- A data steward in the Enterprise data governance department is the owner of the subcategories. Other data stewards are viewers in these categories.

The initial category structure looks like this:

Example category structure

Sue is the executive that Sammy added as the Owner of the Product development category. Sue adds Ann, the data steward for her department, with the Admin role to the Product development category.

In the Product development category, Sue creates these governance rules to document departmental policies:

Information security
Information privacy
Regulations compliance

Ann creates the Measurement category, and therefore Ann has the Owner role. She also inherits the Admin role in the Measurement category from the Product development category. Sammy, Sue, and Public access are collaborators in the Measurement category with their inherited roles.

In the Measurement category, Ann creates business terms that apply to measuring energy in general, such as:

Measurement name
Measurement type
Measurement task

Then, Ann creates two subcategories under the Measurement category:

Gas measurement, with these business terms:
- Gas flow
- Gas pressure
- Gas temperature
Electric measurement, with these business terms:
- Frequency
- Maximum power
- Minimum power

The following illustration shows these categories, their artifacts, and their collaborators.

Example category structure

When catalog users who are in the Public access group find assets with the assigned business term Frequency, the users can see the context for the term in its path: Measurement/Electric measurement/Frequency.

Viewing a category

You can view a category and its artifacts if either of these conditions is true:

You are a member of a user group that is a collaborator in the category, and either you or the group has one of the required permissions to access categories.
You are a collaborator in the category, either directly or inherited from a parent category.

To view a category, go to Governance > Categories, and then click a category name.

Learn more

Parent topic: Governance artifacts