Manage categories (Watson Knowledge Catalog)

You create and manage categories to organize governance artifacts and the people who create and review governance artifacts.

Before you create categories, design your category structure. See Designing categories.

Managing categories includes these tasks:

• Creating a category
• Editing a category
• Managing category collaborators
• Deleting a category
• Changing the primary category of an artifact
• Adding or changing secondary categories for artifacts
• Importing and exporting categories

Creating a category

Whether you can create or manage a category depends on the level of the category, your user permissions, and on your role within the parent category.

Restrictions You have these restrictions when you create categories:

• The combination of the category path plus its name must be unique.
• Category names cannot contain the >> characters because they are used to specify the hierarchy path, for example, primary category >> subcategory.
• You can't create a subcategory to the [uncategorized] category.
• The maximum number of categories that a user can be assigned to (either directly, or via the user group) is 10000. If you assign more categories to the user, some of them and their associated artefacts might not be displayed correctly.

Creating a top-level category

By default, the [uncategorized] category is the only top-level category.

Required permissions You must have this user permission to create top-level categories:

• Manage governance categories

To create a top-level category, choose Governance > Categories, then click Add category. Add a name and optional description and click Save.

When you create a top-level category, it has these users by default:

• The user who creates the category, with the Owner role
• The All users group, with the Viewer role

Creating a subcategory

Before you can create a subcategory, there must be at least one top-level category other than the [uncategorized] category.

Required permissions
You must have both user permissions and category collaborator roles to create a subcategory:

• You must have one of these user permissions:
  • Access governance artifacts
  • Manage governance categories
• You must also have one of these category collaborator roles in the parent category:
  • Admin
  • Owner
  • A custom role with the permission to add subcategories.

To create a subcategory, open an existing category other than the [uncategorized] category and click Add category. Add a name and optional description and click Save. You have the Owner role in the new category.

To create multiple subcategories under one category, you must go back to the main category each time to create the subcategory. For example, you want to create the two subcategories A and B under category C: From category C, you create subcategory A, go back to category C, and from there, create subcategory B.

Editing a category

You can edit these category properties:

• The category name. Select Rename from the action menu next to the category name.
• The description. Click the edit icon next to the description in the About this category pane.

You can add or remove collaborators in the About this category pane or the Access control page.

Also, you can add or remove tags in the About this category pane.

On the Content tab, you can add subcategories and governance artifacts and, if available, you can edit custom attributes.

Required permissions
You must have a combination of user permissions and category collaborator roles to edit category properties:

• You must have one of these user permissions:
  • Access governance artifacts
  • Manage governance categories
• You must also have one of these category collaborator roles in the category:
  • Admin
  • Owner
  • A custom role with the permission to edit categories.

Restrictions You can't rename the [uncategorized] category.
You can't change a category's parent category.

Deleting a category

Before you can delete a category, you must delete or move all the primary artifacts from the category and from its subcategories and then delete its subcategories.

Required permissions You must have a combination of user permissions and category collaborator roles to delete a category:

• You must have one of these user permissions:
  • Access governance artifacts
  • Manage governance categories
• You must also have the Owner role in the category, or a custom role with the permission to delete categories.

Restriction You can't delete the [uncategorized] category.

To delete a category, open it and select Delete from the action menu next to its name.

Changing the primary category of an artifact

When you create a draft governance artifact, you specify its primary category. You can change the primary category for a draft version of an artifact. However, changing the primary category for an artifact does not switch the workflow. The workflow continues as specified for the original primary category.

Required permissions You must have one of these roles in both the original and the new primary categories to change the primary category for an artifact:

• Admin
• Owner
• Editor
• A custom role with the permission to edit a specific artifact type.

To assign or change the primary category for an artifact, open the draft artifact, click the pencil icon next to Primary category, select the primary category, and click Save.

Adding or changing secondary categories for artifacts

You can add secondary categories to either draft or published artifacts.

Required permissions You must have one of these roles in both the primary category of the artifact and the secondary category that you want to add or remove:

• Admin
• Owner
• Editor
• A custom role with the permission to edit a specific artifact type.

To add one or more secondary categories to an artifact, go to the artifact's detail page and click the plus icon next to Secondary categories. Select one or more categories and click Save.

To remove a secondary category from a draft or published artifact, open the artifact and click Remove from the menu next to the secondary category name.

You can add one or more secondary artifacts of a specified artifact type to a category. To add one or more secondary artifacts to a category, open the category and click Add to category. Select the artifact type, and then select one or more artifacts and click OK.

To remove a secondary artifact from a category, open the category and click Remove from the menu next to the secondary artifact name.

Learn more

• Designing categories
• Managing category collaborators
• Category collaborator roles
• Importing and exporting categories

Parent topic: Categories