Searching in the Federated Catalog

One single interface

In the federated catalog, end-users can search and explore the data landscape of the whole organization through a single interface: Zeenea Explorer.

Based on your user groups and related catalog access rights, you can perform searches among all your items and also items that have been shared in the Marketplace by any catalog, in the same place.

You can identify the catalog to which each item belongs, thanks to the "catalog" badge in the search results. You can also filter items by catalog(s) to refine your search, by selecting the ones you are interested in.

Item visibility

In Zeenea Explorer, you have full access to the documentation of items belonging to one of your catalogs, as well as to the documentation of shared items.

Nevertheless, items to which you have access may be linked to other items to which you do not have access (i.e. relations in a lineage or with domain-specific custom items). These unshared items are still visible in the Explorer to avoid misunderstanding an item context. That means they can be mentioned in graphs (lineage, view 360, etc.) or in overview panels and details pages.

However, unshared items or items belonging to catalogs to which you don't have read permission are not returned in search results, so searches aren't overwhelmed by irrelevant results. Moreover, access to these items is restricted to their overview panel. The navigation features to their details page are disabled.

Topics & Marketplace

Topics are also available in the Federated Catalog. Catalog curators are responsible for defining topics for their perimeter. Therefore, topics offer a way to create entry points to explore and search inside a single catalog.

There is an exception with the Marketplace topic. This built-in topic is available to all Explorers and groups all shared items in the federation regardless of their catalog.