Catalog Overview page

The catalog's home page — a unified surface combining Search, Directory cards, Top tags, Domains, the per-class Entities report, Recommended quick-jumps, and (when auth on) Owner association.

The Catalog Overview is the catalog's home page — a single landing surface that combines every Data Discovery entry path the platform offers. A first-time user opening the platform lands here and reaches Search, the Directory's first level, the catalog's most-used tags, the Domains drill-down, a per-class Entities report, and (once they own data) personalised quick-jumps from one screen.

The Catalog Overview is the user's first encounter with the catalog and the unified pivot that links every other Data Discovery surface. It does not introduce new functionality of its own — it surfaces the existing pillars in one place.

Catalog Overview page rendered on a populated deployment — main search, top tags, the per-class Entities report, the source-type Directory, and the Recommended quick-jumps.

Sections

The page renders the following sections top-to-bottom. Three sections are conditional — Domains appears only when at least one Data Entity Group is flagged as a domain; Directory appears only when at least one DataSource has been registered (a fresh deployment hides the band); and Owner association appears only when authentication is enabled and the signed-in user is not yet linked to an Owner.

Main search

Full-text search bar across the catalog. The same Search facets that the Search and Filtering page exposes are reachable from here — typing a term lands on the Catalog page with the query pre-populated.

Top tags

The most-used tags across the deployment, rendered as one-click filter chips. Selecting a chip pre-filters the catalog to entities carrying that tag. Tag vocabulary is curated under Management → Tags; this surface is read-only.

Domains (conditional)

A list of Data Entity Groups that have been flagged as domains, rendered as quick-jump tiles. The section appears only when at least one DEG is domain-flagged; on a fresh deployment it is hidden.

Entities

The per-class usage report — one card per Data Entity class registered on the platform (Datasets, Transformers, Transformer Runs, Quality Tests, Quality Test Runs, Consumers, Inputs, Groups, Relationships — the list is platform-driven and grows when new classes ship). Each card shows the total number of entities of that class, the number of "unfilled" entities (those with only a title and no metadata, owners, tags, or related terms), and is clickable — clicking runs a pre-filtered search for that class.

The Entities card grid is the catalog's coverage-at-a-glance surface: an operator scanning it sees per-class counts and the unfilled fraction, which together signal which classes need stewardship attention.

Directory (conditional)

Quick links into the source-system Directory, grouped by data source type. This surface renders the same level-1 cards the standalone Directory page renders — clicking a card drills directly into level 2.

The band appears only when at least one DataSource is registered on the platform. On a fresh deployment with no DataSources, the band is hidden; the standalone Directory page remains reachable through navigation but is empty until a DataSource starts producing entities.

Recommended

Personalised quick-jumps for the signed-in user, grouped into four columns. Surfaces recently-ingested owned entities and entities related to them through lineage, helping a returning user pick up where they left off without typing a search.

The Recommended panel requires the signed-in user to be linked to an Owner; without the user-owner association in place, the Recommended panel is empty. On auth-disabled deployments (auth.type=DISABLED) the panel is hidden from the home page entirely — there is no user-owner identity to filter on, so the entire surface is removed rather than rendered with unfiltered data. The underlying GET /api/dataentities/popular REST endpoint that backs the Popular column remains reachable under DISABLED for any caller on the network.

The four columns:

1. My Objects — the most recently ingested five data entities where the user is mentioned as an owner.

2. Upstream Dependencies — data entities that serve as direct origins to those the user owns.

3. Downstream Dependencies — entities that are direct targets of those the user owns.

4. Popular — the most-viewed data entities across the catalog, ranked by view count alone (highest first). See the caveat below — this ranking is trivially inflatable.

Wizards on Recommended panel

The Popular column ranks by view count alone, and view count is trivially inflatable — treat it as a rough popularity hint, not a trustworthy signal. The only input to the Popular ranking is each entity's view count, sorted highest-first; there is no weighting by recency, ownership, or any other signal. View count, in turn, is bumped by +1 every time a detail page is fetched, with no rate limit, no per-user de-duplication, and no authentication required — and opening a detail page registers as +2, not +1 (see Data entity detail page → view count). Because the GET /api/dataentities/popular endpoint and the detail-page read are both reachable on a deployment with authentication disabled (auth.type=DISABLED), a short scripted read loop can push any chosen entity to the top of the Popular column. Do not use the Popular ranking as evidence of real usage in audits or capacity decisions; cross-check against your own access logs.

Each tile carries a freshness indicator — an orange "time" icon signals stale entities (see Metadata stale for the freshness window and how operators tune it) and a per-class icon on the right indicates the entity type. Clicking a tile opens that entity's detail page, defaulting to the Overview tab.

All four columns are rendered by a single shared list component, so they share rendering, sort, refetch, and pagination semantics. Each column shows up to five entries; there is no per-column "view more" affordance and no per-column sort or filter. A change that affects column rendering affects all four uniformly.

exclude_from_search is a full-text-search signal only — it does not hide entities from the Recommended panel or from any other list surface. The platform's nine list-shape consumers (the Popular column, the By-Owner list, the By-Term list, the DEG-experiment runs view, the entity dimensions surfaces, the entity-detail GET, and the query-suggestions endpoint) all read through a shared SQL helper that filters on soft-delete and hollow flags only — it does not apply the exclude_from_search predicate. The flag IS honoured on the full-text search path and on the count / statistics aggregates. An operator who toggles exclude_from_search=true on a staging or internal entity expecting it removed from the Recommended panel discovers it still appears there (and on By-Owner / By-Term / lineage list surfaces) until a platform-side fix lifts the predicate into the shared helper. Until that ships, treat the flag as a search-engine signal, not a platform-wide hide signal.

This surface is distinct from the Alerts → My Objects tab, which is a different feature with the same name (Alerts → My Objects filters open alerts on the user's owned entities; Recommended → My Objects surfaces recently-ingested owned entities). See Alerting → Alert views — All, My Objects, Dependents for the distinction.

Owner association (conditional)

When authentication is enabled and the signed-in user is not yet linked to an Owner, this surface renders one of three states depending on whether the user has previously submitted a request. Once the user is bound to an Owner, the surface is replaced with the Recommended panel (the four-column quick-jumps live in the same vertical band).

Branch	Trigger condition	What the user sees	Path forward
Form	Signed in, no Owner binding, no prior request.	The Owner-association form with the Owner-name autocomplete and the Send a request button (see User-owner association → For regular users).	Submit the form; the request enters the admin-approval flow.
Pending	Request submitted, status PENDING.	A "Request is being checked" screen with no cancel affordance — the request is one-shot.	Wait for an admin to approve or decline on Management → Associations → New requests. There is no self-service cancel today; see User-owner association → Changing or removing your association.
Declined	Most recent request returned DECLINED.	A dismissable banner with the declined notice, followed by the request form so the user can submit a new request.	Dismiss the banner and submit a new request; note the banner dismiss is per-session and not persisted — see User-owner association → If your request is declined.
Approved	User bound to an Owner.	The four-column Recommended panel takes over the same vertical band — see Recommended above.	The form is gone; quick-jumps replace it.

Pending Owner-association requests are routed to Management → Associations for an operator with the OWNER_ASSOCIATION_MANAGE permission to approve. On auth-disabled deployments (auth.type=DISABLED) the section is hidden (no user identity, nothing to associate).

Catalog Overview vs entity Overview tab

Two distinct things share the name "Overview". The Catalog Overview described on this page is the catalog's home page — the unified surface combining Search, Directory, tags, Domains, Entities, Recommended, and the optional Owner association request. The per-entity Overview tab is the landing tab inside any data entity's detail page — entity description, owners, tags, terms, custom metadata. They are different surfaces; do not confuse them when reading docs or filing bug reports.

Where to next

• Search and Filtering — the query-driven entry path the Catalog Overview surfaces at the top.

• Directory — the hierarchy-driven entry path the Catalog Overview surfaces inline (level-1 cards).

• Data entity detail page — the destination of every Recommended tile, every Search result row, and every Directory entity row.

• Manual Object Tagging — the source data behind the Top tags chip strip.

• Data Entity Groups & Domains — the source data behind the Domains section.

• Metadata stale — the freshness signal Recommended tiles render via the orange "time" icon.

• User-owner association — the operator-side configuration the Owner association section + the Recommended panel both depend on.

• Data Discovery overview — the bucket landing this page sits under.