Searching for assets and artifacts across the platform (Watson Studio and Watson Knowledge Catalog)
You can use the global search bar to search for assets across all the projects, deployment spaces, and catalogs to which you have access. You can also search for governance artifacts across the categories to which you have access.
Restrictions for global search
Global search has these restrictions:
- Search results show you only the governance artifacts in categories that you have permission to view. See Find governance artifacts.
- Updates to category collaborators or roles might take up to 20 minutes to take effect.
- Assets in the Information assets view are not returned by global search.
Searching for assets and artifacts
To search for an asset or artifact, you can enter one or more words in the global search field. The search results are matches from these properties of assets and artifacts:
- Name
- Description
- Tags
- Synonyms of business terms
- Column names
- Column descriptions
- Assigned governance artifacts
- Assigned categories
- Custom fields
- Table name
- Schema name
- Tags that are assigned to columns
- Business terms that are assigned to columns
- Abbreviations of business terms
- Related business terms and associated assets
You can customize your searches with these techniques:
- Searching for semantically similar assets
- Searching for the start of a word
- Searching for a part of a word
- Searching for a phrase
- Searching for multiple alternative words
Searching for semantically similar assets
If you have a robust set of business terms with relationships to other business terms, you can find assets and terms that are semantically similar to the business terms that match your search string.
This feature is not available by default. Knowledge graph must be installed with Watson Knowledge Catalog. For information on installing knowledge graph, see Specifying additional installation options.
When you enter a search string, business terms are matched based on their names or abbreviations. For example, if the business term contact methods has a defined abbreviation of CTM, then a search string with CTM
returns the business term contact methods.
Search results include business terms that have the following kinds of relationships with the matching business term:
Synonym Business terms that have the same meaning and are listed in the Synonyms section.
Type Business terms one and two levels down the type hierarchy. The first level of the type hierarchy comprises the terms that are listed in the Has a type section of the matching business term. The second level of the type hierarchy comprises terms that are listed in the Has a type section of the business terms that have an Is a type relationship with the matching business term. For example, a business term contact methods has a type of phone number, which has a type of home phone.
Other Business terms with relationships that are shown in the Other related terms section.
For example, suppose you have a business term contact methods that has multiple types of relationships with other business terms.
When you search for customer contact method
, your results might include the following business terms and any assets that have those business terms assigned:
Terms in the result | Reason |
---|---|
contact methods | Its name matches the search string. |
communication technique | It is a synonym of the term contact methods. |
phone number | It has an Is a type of relationship with the term contact methods. |
home phone | It has an Is a type of relationships with the term phone number. |
preferred way to communicate | It has a relationship with the term contact methods. |
Searching for the start of a word
To search for words starting with a letter or letters, enter the first 1 - 3 letters of the word. For example, if you search for in
, you'll get results like initial
and infinite
, but not definite
.
Searching for a part of a word
To search for partial word matches, include more than 3 letters. For example, if you search for conn
, you might get results like connection
and disconnect
.
Only the first 12 characters in a word are used in the search. Any search terms that you enter that are longer than 12 characters are truncated to the first 12 characters.
Searches for partial words don't work in the description fields of assets and artifacts.
Searching for a phrase
To search for a specific phrase, surround the phrase with double quotation marks. For example, if you search for "payment plan prediction"
, your results contain exactly that phrase.
You can include a quoted phrase within a longer search string. For example, if you search for credit card "payment plan prediction"
, you might get results that contain credit card
, credit
, card
,
and payment plan prediction
.
When you search for a phrase in English, natural language analysis optimizes the search results in the following ways:
- Words that are not important to the search intent are removed from the search query.
- Phrases in the search string that are common in English are automatically ranked higher than results for individual words.
For example, if you search for find credit card interest in United States
, you might get the following results:
- Matches for
credit card interest
andUnited States
are prioritized. - Matches for
credit
,card
,interest
,United
, andStates
are returned. - Matches for
in
are not returned.
Searching for multiple alternative words
To find results that contain any of your search terms, enter multiple words. For example, if you search for machine learning
, the results contain the word machine
, the word learning
, or both words.
Selecting results
To select the best result, look at which property of the asset or artifact matches your search string. The matching text is highlighted.
The following image shows what search results might look like.
The highest scoring results are for matches to the name of the asset or artifact. Multiple assets and artifacts can have the same name. However, the name of the project, catalog, deployment space, or category is shown underneath the asset or artifact name so you can determine which result is the one you want.
Click an asset or artifact name to view it in its project, catalog, deployment space, or category.
If you can't find the data asset that you need, you can request access to data. See Requesting access to data.
Results are prioritized in this order:
- Matches of quoted phrases or common phrases (for English only)
- Exact matches of complete words
- Partial matches of complete words
- Fuzzy matches
Filtering and sorting results
You can filter search results by these properties:
- Type of asset or artifact
- Tags
- Stewards or owners (for some types of assets and artifacts)
- The user who modified the asset or artifact
- The time period when the asset or artifact was last modified
- Category (artifacts only)
- Catalog (assets only)
- Projects (assets only)
- Classifications (assets only)
- Business terms
- Source (assets only)
You can sort results by the most relevant or the last modified date.
Learn more
- Finding and viewing assets in catalogs
- Finding and viewing governance artifacts
- Asset types and properties
- Requesting access to data
Parent topic: Accessing data