What is custom metadata?

Atlan provides basic metadata for assets like certification, owners, and descriptions. But since every data team has their own unique needs, Atlan allows you to extend these with your own unique properties.

Custom metadata helps users understand and use data through extra context on assets in Atlan.

Common, standardized context helps people quickly understand data and its background, especially your organization's business users. With custom metadata, finding and working with data has never been easier. Users can filter data and understand its context through your organization's own perspective!

Examples

For example, you could add IPR as a new metadata group to capture intellectual property rights. This could include custom metadata fields like:

  • License type — to define the type of license under which the asset can be used.
  • Provider — to define the source of the asset, in cases where the license requires attribution.

As another example, you might want to integrate details from a custom-built ETL processing engine. You could create an ETL metadata group, and include fields like:

  • Job link — to provide a link to the job run in your ETL engine.
  • Last run date — to show when the job that created or changed this asset last ran.
  • Lat run status — to show whether the last run of the job was successful or not.

Highlights of adding custom metadata

With custom metadata, you can:

  • Organize custom fields in groups defined by you.
  • Ensure accuracy of your metadata values by setting restrictions on values. For example, you can define the type of value (date, boolean), predefined options for values, and so on.
  • Maintain standard metadata by telling the users exactly what metadata values to add for each data asset. No confusion means faster data enrichment!
💪 Did you know? Custom metadata in Atlan lets you add whatever metadata fields you need. This helps the team keep data clean with perfectly customized metadata provisions.

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