What KRISID is
Assets, types, domains and the links between them, in one page.
On this page
KRISID is a catalogue of your organisation's data: what each thing means, where it lives, who answers for it and how it connects to everything else. This page explains the ideas the rest of the help centre builds on.
Assets
Everything KRISID records is an asset. A business term is an asset, and so are a data domain, a table, a column, a report and a metric. Each asset has a name, a type, and a page of its own.
Asset types and type groups
Every asset has an asset type, which says what kind of thing it is: Business Term, Data Entity, Table, Column. Types are gathered into type groups, such as Business and Physical, and the sidebar lists them that way.
Which types exist is not built into KRISID. It comes from the metamodel, a description of what your repository may hold that an administrator maintains. Your repository may call these things something else, and it may have types this help centre never mentions. The screens and Ask always use your repository's own words. The examples here come from the starter model.
Harvested and authored
Assets arrive in two ways.
- Harvested assets are read from a source system, such as a Snowflake warehouse or a Power BI workspace, by a connection an administrator sets up. Databases, schemas, tables, views and columns are usually harvested. Their name and key come from the source, so you cannot change them in KRISID. You can still add attributes, responsibilities and links.
- Authored assets are written by people: business terms, data entities, rules, data products and domains. Stewards create and maintain them.
In the sidebar, a small square beside a type marks it as harvested.
Attributes
An attribute is a fact recorded on an asset: its Definition, its Status, whether it Contains PII. Each type has its own set of attributes, and the metamodel says which are mandatory. An attribute can hold text, a date, a number, yes or no, or one value from a fixed list, such as Draft or Approved for Status.
Some values are declared sensitive, such as Contains PII set to yes. KRISID shows these as a mark on the asset wherever it appears. See Classifications and sensitive data.
Relations
A relation is a link between two assets, and it shows on both of their pages. A data entity is realised by a table, and the table's page shows the same link from its side. A table holds its columns. A business term is owned by a data domain. The metamodel decides which relations may exist between which types, and what each one is called in each direction.
Relations are what make KRISID more than a list. They let you go from a business meaning to the table that holds it, and from a column to the domain that answers for it.
Domains and roll-up
A data domain is an area of the business, such as Customer or Finance, that answers for a set of assets. KRISID calls the type used this way a grouping. In the starter model it is Data Domain, and your administrator can add others.
An asset belongs to a domain when it is owned by that domain, or when whatever contains it is. A column belongs to its table's domain, and an attribute belongs to its entity's domain. This is roll-up: everything a domain answers for, including what sits inside the things it owns. Three rules apply:
- An asset can belong to several domains at once.
- Anything with no owner of its own inherits one from what contains it.
- An owner named on the asset itself beats what it would inherit.
See Browsing by domain and by type.
Responsibilities
A responsibility records who answers for an asset and in what role. In the starter model the roles include Data Owner, Data Steward, Technical Custodian, Subject Matter Expert and Consumer. A person or a team can hold a responsibility.
Responsibilities flow down. A Data Steward named on a domain is the steward of everything in it, unless something lower down names its own. When KRISID shows an inherited responsibility, it says where it came from. See Owners, stewards and responsibilities.
Lineage
Lineage is the path data takes: which tables feed a view, which view feeds a report. KRISID draws it as a picture you can follow upstream or downstream. Lineage can come from harvesting, from SQL KRISID reads, or from links people declare. See Lineage and connections.
The context layer
When you search, KRISID looks at more than names. For every asset it keeps the asset's own words (name, key, synonyms, description, definition, the source system's comment and tags) and also the words of what surrounds it. A table can therefore be found by the business term it realises or the domain it belongs to. When a result was found through its surroundings, the result says so, for example Matched through …. How often an asset is used also helps decide which result comes first.
Demonstration data
A new repository may include invented example assets so there is something to explore. These are labelled demo data wherever they appear, and they are always listed after real results. Never act on them. Your administrator decides whether to keep them.