Searching for assets and artifacts across the platform

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.

Base Premium Standard Unless otherwise noted, this information applies to all editions of IBM Knowledge Catalog.

Requirements and restrictions
Searching for assets and artifacts
Searching for properties
Selecting results
Saving your search

Requirements and restrictions

You can find assets and artifacts under the following circumstances.

Required services

None. Search is always available.

Required permissions

You can have any role in projects, catalogs, or deployment spaces to find assets.

You can have any role in categories to find governance artifacts.

Workspaces

You can search for assets that are projets, deployments spaces, and catalogs.

You can search for governance artifacts that are in categories.

Types of assets

You can search for all types of assets.

Restrictions

When you are added as a category collaborator, you might need to wait up to 20 minutes before you can search for governance artifacts in that category.

Your search results include only assets and artifacts in workspaces that you belong to.

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
Display name
Description
Tags
Synonyms of business terms
Column names
Note: To search for column names, ensure that the asset is profiled. If you create assets in a catalog for which automatic profiling is disabled, you might not be able to search for column names unless you run profiling on these assets.
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
Related artifacts for business terms and data classes

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 IBM Knowledge Catalog or IBM Knowledge Catalog Premium. 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 enter the first 3 letters of the word.

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.

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 and United States are prioritized.
Matches for credit, card, interest, United, and States 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.

Searching for properties

Using key:value pairs in the search bar, you can search within asset and artifact properties, such as the description, tags, custom properties, column names, and many more. The highest priority is always given to the asset or artifact name.

For the out of the box properties you can provide the following search keys. The search drop-down provides auto-complete suggestions for these keys. Note that for some of these keys only exact match is supported in search results, when some of them support partial match.

Property name	Key to use in search	Description	Partial match supported?
Name	`name:`	Search within the name of an asset or artifact.	Yes
Description	`desc:`	Search within the description of an asset or artifact.	Yes
Business terms	`term:`	Search in assets and artifacts with a specific business term assigned.	Yes
Tags	`tag:`	Search in assets and artifacts with a specific tag.	Yes
Primary category	`category:`	Search for artifacts with the specified primary category.	Yes
Secondary categories	`category2:`	Search for artifacts with the specified secondary category.	Yes
Classifications	`classification:`	Search by the classification of an asset or artifact.	Yes
Abbreviation	`abbr:`	Search by the abbreviation of a business term.	No
Synonyms	`syn:`	Search by the synonym of a business term.	No
Name (column)	`column:`	Search within the name of a column in a data asset.	Yes
Description (column)	`columnDesc:`	Search within the description of a column in a data asset.	Yes
Tags (column)	`columnTag:`	Search with a tag on a column in a data asset.	Yes
Business term (column)	`columnTerm:`	Search with a business term assigned to a column in a data asset.	Yes
Data class (column)	`columnDataclass:`	Search with a data class of a column in a data asset.	No
Connection path	`connection:`	Search with a connection path for an asset.	Yes
Schema name	`schema:`	Search for data assets with the specified schema name.	Yes
Table name	`table:`	Search for data assets with the specified table name.	Yes
Resource key	`resourceKey:`	Search with a resource key for an asset.	No

You can search using the keys in the following ways:

Provide a key:value pair in the search bar to search within a specific property. For example, to search for assets that have the word customer in their name, use the following pair: name:customer. If the value consists of multiple words, include them in quotes, for example name:"sales report"
Use multiple key:value pairs to further refine your search, for example: name:sales type:report. The search results will include all assets with sale in the name field and report in the type field.
Combine the key:value pair with any text string, such as: name:sales report. The word sales is searched for in the name field, and the word report as a regular string.
Combine the key:value pair with the filter pill to further refine your search.

Ensure there is no space after key: as in key: value because such phrase is not treated as a pair by search.

Searching for asset and artifact custom properties

You can also use a key:value pair to search within custom properties of the assets or artifacts. Note that auto-complete suggestions are not available for custom properties, you must provide the key exactly as it is saved in the system.

You can use the following API call to retrieve the list of custom properties for a specific artifact:

GET /v3/governance_artifact_types/{artifact_type}/custom_attribute_definitions

For assets, the key consists of the group identifier and the custom property identifier connected with a dot: CP_group_unique_identifier.CP_unique_identifier.

To retrieve these identifiers from the UI, open the custom property or a group, and click Edit, then click Show identifier.

To retrieve the unique identifiers with API:

Use the following API to retrieve group identifiers:
```
GET /v2/asset_types/{type_name}
```
The unique identifiers for custom property groups are listed in the decorated_by property.
Use the same endpoint but providing the custom property group unique identifier as the asset type_name to get the identifiers of the custom properties included in this group.

Note that custom attributes must be defined as searchable to work in the global search bar. To check whether a custom property is searchable:

Use the following query to verify which fields are marked as global_search_searchable for an asset type:

GET /v2/asset_types/{asset_type_name}

Use the web interface: go to Administration > Governance and catalogs > Asset and artifact definitions > Custom properties. Find the property and verify that in the Advanced settings, the checkbox Make searchable in global search is checked. Note that even if you change this setting, only the newly added values for this property are affected.

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. When searching by custom properties, the matching text is currently not visible in the search results.

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

From the search results, you can click Preview to view more information in the side panel. You can also publish an asset from a project to a catalog with the Publish to catalog button, or add an asset from a catalog to a project using the Add to project button.

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)
Workspaces
Column term
Column data class
Schema
Table
Deployment spaces (assets only)
Classifications (assets only)
Business terms
Source (assets only)

You can sort results by the most relevant or the last modified date.

Saving your search

You can save your search criteria for later use. Your saved searches are listed in the drop-down list when you type in the search bar. You can also edit or delete the saved search.

Provide the search terms in the search bar and apply filters to the search results if needed. When ready, click Save search on the top bar.
Click the Saved searches icon to view the list in the right-hand panel. From there, you can either change the search name, or delete the saved search.

Learn more

Parent topic: Accessing data