Exploring relationships

Relationship explorer helps to visualize, explore, and govern metadata by generating a graph to show how governance artifacts and data assets relate with each other. It provides a context for reaching a high level of understanding of the metadata.

This feature is not available by default. It must be enabled by installing the optional knowledge graph component with IBM Knowledge Catalog or IBM Knowledge Catalog Premium. For more information, see Installing IBM Knowledge Catalog in the IBM Software Hub documentation.

Required permissions

You must have one of the following user permissions:

  • Access governance artifacts
  • Access catalogs
  • Manage glossary

Watch this short video to learn about the relationship explorer.

This video provides a visual method to learn the concepts and tasks in this documentation.

Viewing relationship explorer

You can explore the relationships of governance artifacts in the following way:

  1. Go to Governance and select the governance artifact type that contains the governance artifact you want to explore.
  2. Select the governance artifact and click Explore relationships.

You can explore the relationships of catalog assets in the following way:

  1. Go to Catalogs > All catalogs.
  2. Choose a catalog that contains the assets you want to explore.
  3. Select the asset and click Explore relationships.

You can explore the relationships of project assets in the following way:

  1. Go to Projects > All projects.
  2. Choose a project that contains the assets you want to explore.
  3. Select the asset and click Explore relationships.

Managing relationship explorer's graph

Relationship explorer generates a graph on a canvas, where selected relationships between items are viewed. Each node represents an item and each edge represents a relationship with its name on it. You can move items around by dragging them on the canvas.

You can add items to the graph from the Related items panel. The panel shows up to 10000 items that relate with chosen governance artifact or catalog asset. To view them on the canvas, select All related items to add them all at once or select manually which one to add.

View indirect relationships between items on the canvas. Indirect relationship appears when some items were removed from the canvas and other items connects through them. Those relationships are indicated by a dashed line.

The Canvas summary panel shows all items that are included in the graph. You can search for a specific item by typing its name in the search bar, or search for it in the Items section.

Click an Item metadata icon information.svg to view the item's details or navigate to the selected item.

Downloading and sharing the graph

In the Share panel, you can export or share the link to the canvas.

  • To share the graph, click a Copy shared link to create a shared link to a canvas. Users with this link can open the canvas in Cloud Pak for Data UI. The created link is available only for 30 days.
  • To download the graph select the export area and file format, then click Export.

Learn more

Parent topic: Relationships in a catalog