What is a data catalog?

A data catalog is an organized, searchable inventory of an organization's data assets. It contains metadata, such as data descriptions, lineage and quality information, enabling data discovery and understanding. Data catalogs provide a single source of truth, bridging the gap between technical and non-technical users. By enhancing data comprehension and accessibility, data catalogs empower organizations to unlock innovation and growth.

Why is a data catalog important?

A crucial data intelligence component, a data catalog enhances data discovery, understanding and trust within an organization. By providing a single source of truth for data assets, it fosters collaboration and informed decision-making. With proper governance, data catalogs ensure data quality, understanding and compliance with policies and regulations. Ultimately, a well-governed data catalog empowers organizations to unlock data's full potential.

What is the difference between a business glossary and a data catalog?

A business glossary is a collection of data-related terms and descriptions, ensuring organizations speak the same language by clearing up ambiguity in business terminology. Conversely, a data catalog is a centralized repository containing information about an organization's data assets. Data catalogs utilize metadata – data about data – to make data assets easier to find, understand, trust and access to drive better business decisions.

What is the difference between a data catalog and a data marketplace?

A data catalog is a centralized repository for managing and organizing data assets, helping data owners and stewards keep track of metadata. A data marketplace allows users to discover, access, and collaborate on curated data. Some data catalog solutions have integrated with data marketplaces, bridging data management with easy access to trusted data.

Accelerate data discovery, understanding and access

Discover, understand and simplify access to your data through 100+ native data connectors, automated profiling, curation and enrichment, and an intuitive data marketplace experience.

Key features and capabilities

Create a unified view of your data assets

Break down silos and gain deep visibility into your data through more than 100+ native integrations enabling seamless, automated discovery across your entire ecosystem – including unstructured data.

Automate time-consuming data stewardship tasks

Improve productivity by accelerating tedious, manual curation and data stewardship tasks with capabilities including automatic classification and AI-driven asset-description generation.

Enrich data with useful business context

Empower business and technical team members to quickly connect data to glossary terms, policies, data contracts, quality metrics, stakeholders and more, fostering enhanced data understanding.

Collaboratively build reusable data products

Collaboratively build and manage data products leveraging a flexible operating model and workflows. Define service-level objectives (SLOs) in data contracts for reliable, fresh data access.

Simplify access to curated, trusted data

Enable data consumers to easily discover trusted data products in Collibra Data Marketplace — a curated, self-service portal offering a user-friendly data shopping experience.

View business and technical data lineage

Automatically map end-to-end lineage across data sources and systems to understand where your data originated, where it has been and how it’s being used.

Seamlessly collaborate around data

Discuss, rate and certify data assets to share knowledge across your organization, and utilize out-of-the-box or custom workflows to easily manage, automate and collaborate around tasks.

Enable compliant access to trustworthy data

Provide the right users with access to the right data with embedded policy management, privacy capabilities and granular security controls.

We needed to provide data dictionaries to our regulators in which we had some gaps in field level descriptions. It was as simple as the push of a button to generate and a few minutes to review and approve. We got the request done in a matter of hours vs. weeks all thanks to generative AI descriptions from Collibra.

Evan Loenser

Associate Director of Enterprise Data and Reporting, UCare Minnesota

Accelerate data discovery, understanding and access

Key features and capabilities

Create a unified view of your data assets