We're excited to announce the release of Cloud Pak for Data v4.0, which includes many updates to Watson Knowledge Catalog. We are on a journey of bringing together data quality, data governance and data consumption capabilities on a platform that can be deployed anywhere. In this release, we continued to add capabilities that align to that strategy.

Data Governance

• Mask columns based on business term assignment and column name - The conditions available in data protections rules have expanded to allow users to anonymize columns using business terms and column name. Now you can feel even more confident that your organization is following data privacy policies.

• Define and manage custom relationships between governance artifacts - Today, we offer out of the box relationships between artifacts like listing synonyms, showing that one business term is a part of another business term, and relating a governance rule to a business term. With this release, you can define your own relationships to extend the meaning of your glossary. You can clearly articulate rules that govern critical data elements or business terms that are antonyms of each other. This will help your organization form WKC to represent your own organization's meta-model rather than the other way around.

• Additional support for import/export - We've added capabilities to help you migrate governance artifacts between dev, test and prod environments using a command line interface.

Data Consumption

• Define and manage custom attributes on all catalog assets - Customizing the metadata you capture on assets is critical to making sure Watson Knowledge Catalog collects the information your organization needs. Now administrators can define new attributes on catalog assets using an API.

• Global search enhancements - Search is how our users find the assets or data elements they're looking for, which is why it's important we enhance the results to be as productive as possible. Users can now search using phrases and the search results will have better rankings to match prioritization.

Data Quality

• Bulk publish and term assignment in quick scan - Quick scan helps users quickly discover data assets, profile columns and assess data quality. Now, we've added bulk actions, so enriching the metadata and publishing it to the catalog can be done faster.

• Support in Auto discovery for Data virtualization, Redshift and Apache Kudu - We are always expanding our support for connectivity to tools and sources. With this release, users will see these 3 additional sources.

• User experience enhancements to metadata import and data rule definitions - At the start of 2021, Watson Knowledge Catalog won an iF software design award. Part of what won us that award is our constant iteration of the user experience based on user testing.

Platform

• User group support - Administrators can now set up user groups of people, so they need only grant a user group access to a catalog or category in order for a set of users to have permissions and receive notifications on those artifacts and assets.

• Audit logging - It's important for our customers to audit all events that happen in Watson Knowledge Catalog to understand who did what and when. We've expanded our audit logging support to include events in the catalog, on governance artifacts, and through workflow.

• Support for OpenShift v4.6+ - Cloud Pak for Data now runs on the latest version of RedHat OpenShift.

If any of these capabilities interest you, check them out by signing up for a free trial of Watson Knowledge Catalog on IBM Cloud!