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Tags

Tags give you a way to classify and group assets in different ways, for example:

  • By industry standard information security or sensitivity schemes (for example: PII)
  • By department or business domain (for example: HR, Finance, Marketing, and so on)
  • By key characteristic for alerting (for example: data quality issue, load failure, or similar)
  • Really any other way you want to group together your assets

Propagation

What's special about tags?

What's unique about a tag is that Atlan can propagate it for you automatically, to related assets:

  • From upstream assets to downstream assets (via lineage)
  • From parent assets to child assets (for example, from a table to all of its columns)
  • From a term to all of its linked assets

This becomes particularly powerful when using tags to represent key information you want to let your users know about. For example:

Tagging problematic assets

  • If you find a problem on an asset, you can tag that asset as having a known issue.
  • With propagation, Atlan will automatically tag all downstream (impacted) assets as having a known issue as well.
  • Even better, you can see from that propagated tag which upstream asset(s) are the source of that known issue.

Tagging sensitive assets

  • You can create a glossary of terms core to your business like customer details, accounts, etc.
  • You can assign the terms in that glossary to the data assets that hold that information.
  • You can then tag the terms with sensitivity ratings (like PII, Confidential, Public, etc).
  • With propagation, Atlan will automatically tag all related data assets with those same sensitivity ratings.
  • Even better, any assets or fields derived from those assets (even if named differently) will be propagated that sensitivity rating as well.

Branding

You can also "brand" tags to provide quick visual distinction:

  • Choose from a predefined list of icons
  • Apply a color to the tag
  • Or even upload your own image to use as an icon to represent the tag

Access control

Tags can also be used to control access to assets, through purposes . When combined with propagation, you gain a very powerful, automated means to protect your most sensitive data.